V 
 
 LIBRAPxY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822 02667 1404 
 
 5 II
 
 ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY
 
 ROMANCE &? TRAGEDY 
 
 BY 
 PROSSER HALL FRYE 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 MDCCCCXXII
 
 COPYRIGHT, I922 
 BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 THE PLIMPTON PEESS • NORWOOD • MASSACHUSETTS 
 PUNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 To 
 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 ToOto yap novov, etirep apa, av6ei\Kei> av Kal naTttxtv kv rw £1)i>, 
 el av^rjv e</>eiro tols to. avra Soyfxara irtpLirtironinkvois 
 
 Marcus Aureiius
 
 NOTE 
 
 OF THE papers printed in this volume the first, 
 second, third, and fourth appeared originally 
 in The Mid-West Quarterly for April, 1914, Octo- 
 ber, 1913, January, 1914, and July, 191 5, respec- 
 tively; the fifth and sixth in University Studies 
 (Nebraska) for October, 191 3, and July-October, 
 191 9. The seventh and eighth have never been 
 published before. 
 
 The notion of using Goethe's phrase, " the illusion 
 of a higher reality," as a kind of canon or test of 
 literature — an idea that I have worked out after 
 a fashion in the last two essays — occurred to me 
 first in a paper on Maupassant which was written 
 for the New York Evening Post and was afterwards 
 included in my Literary Reviews and Criticisms 
 (1908). 
 
 Logically, the paper entitled " Corneille: the Neo- 
 Classic Tragedy and the Greek," which appears in 
 the Reviews and Criticisms, should stand in this 
 volume between " Greek Tragedy " and " Racine "; 
 but at the publication of the earlier volume the 
 thought of such a series had not come into my mind.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Literature and Criticism i 
 
 II. The Terms Classic and Romantic ... . 21 
 
 III. German Romanticism 57 
 
 IV. Nietzsche 02 
 
 V. The Idea of Greek Tragedy 141 
 
 VI. Racine 205 
 
 VII. Shakespeare and Sophocles 277 
 
 VIII. Structure and Style 312 
 
 IX
 
 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 LITERATURE AND CRITICISM 
 
 IN THESE days of " scientific method," when 
 there is so little literary activity of a genuinely 
 critical sort, it is 'a good deal easier to say in what 
 such activity does not, than in what it does, consist. 
 That literary criticism is not identical with a study 
 of words or language, or yet of texts or " docu- 
 ments"; that it is not to be confounded with phil- 
 ology or with the exploration of origins or deriva- 
 tions, or the investigation of manuscripts, or a de- 
 termination of the details of literary history — all 
 this ought to be reasonably clear on the face of it, 
 and when stated in so many words, would probably 
 be conceded even by those who have done most to 
 cause the present confusion. That such subjects 
 and pursuits are very interesting, very important in 
 their way, there is no gainsaying. The study of 
 etymology alone has been of great, if indirect assist- 
 ance in the comprehension of literature, although 
 to an hundred etymologists there is probably no 
 more than one good critic. But still literature is 
 something more than words and lives with another 
 life than theirs ; they are but the appurtenances, and 
 neither phonology nor phonetics will ever furnish 
 the basis for a satisfactory criticism of literature,
 
 2 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 any more than a chemistry of pigments will suffice 
 for a criticism of painting. 
 
 Nor is this general statement less applicable to 
 the study of " literary " than of linguistic sources, 
 rudiments, and developments, however useful the 
 one, as the other, to the indirect appreciation of 
 literature. Unfortunately it is only too easy to over- 
 rate the importance of primitive and dialectic " lit- 
 erature " — of " communal poetry," for example, or 
 the early Germanic " epic " ; or rather, to rate them 
 in inappropriate and misleading terms. So when 
 Dr. Sweet declares that Judith " combines the ' high- 
 est dramatic and constructive power with the utmost 
 brilliance of language and metre '," he is obviously 
 using a fabulous terminology which leaves nothing 
 to be said for a Shakespeare or a Sophocles. 
 
 Even the name literature in such a connection 
 must be taken in a cautious and qualified way; 
 since it is just the want of a term to distinguish the 
 " documentary " from the literary, which has con- 
 firmed, if it has not induced, the current misappre- 
 hension. That a piece of writing may have a rela- 
 tive or historical value without any absolute or 
 literary value, is anything but an uncommon occur- 
 rence; indeed, most writing is of this kind. On the 
 contrary, it happens only too often that this tenta- 
 tive and rudimentary " literature," these gropings 
 and strayings of an immature or defective culture, 
 which we are naively expected to admire nowadays, 
 are perfectly indifferent to criticism — that is, to a 
 better sense of the permanent significance of life, 
 and are of interest solely to scholarship — that is, 
 to a knowledge and reconstruction of the past. For
 
 Literature and Criticism 3 
 
 such, after all, is essentially the difference between 
 the functions of scholarship and of criticism: the 
 former seeks to determine the fact; the latter, to 
 interpret it. While scholarship endeavours to re- 
 constitute the past in its habit as it lived, criticism 
 attempts to liberate the idea, to set free the mes- 
 sage it has to communicate. In this sense scholarship 
 is " scientific," if one likes the word; it deals with 
 facts, with the thing itself; it is impersonal and in 
 its own manner final. Its results, when once ob- 
 tained, are definitive and are taken up into the 
 common stock of information, though their original 
 form and method may be superseded and forgotten. 
 On the other hand, criticism, as an affair of ideas, 
 is necessarily individual and relative; for although 
 literature is itself essentially in the nature of a per- 
 manent contribution to human experience, its appli- 
 cation will vary from one generation to another and 
 its interpretation will change with the age — to say 
 nothing of the further circumstance that its mean- 
 ing is always exposed to a personal reaction. How 
 close the connection, then, between scholarship and 
 criticism, is at once apparent. But though it is 
 perhaps no wonder under the circumstances that 
 the two offices of verification and interpretation 
 should be confounded — particularly in view of the 
 unwarrantable extension which has been given of 
 late years to the province of philology; yet the two 
 are, in reality, distinct, and the integrity of our 
 thought requires that they should be kept so. 
 
 In this way the remains of Gothic, consisting of 
 a few biblical translations and a legal instrument or 
 two, constituted an historical find of some impor-
 
 4 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tance since they served to fill a gap in our knowledge 
 of the Germanic dialects; but as literature they are 
 naught, and may be neglected by a sound criticism 
 without our suffering the slightest intellectual incon- 
 venience or the smallest arrest of moral growth. 
 Even Beowulf itself, that venerable monument of 
 Teutonic ingenuousness, is, I believe, more interest- 
 ing as history than as literature, though treated 
 with exaggerated respect by our modern philological 
 scholarship. At all events, it ought to be spoken of 
 in other and more moderate terms than its admirers 
 commonly use of it, as though it were in any sense 
 comparable with the Iliad or the Odyssey. " Scien- 
 tifically " they are both, no doubt, the products of a 
 barbaric " culture "; but the inability to feel their 
 moral incommensurability is in itself a sufficient 
 critical disqualification for speaking of them at all. 
 To the scholar, to the student, even to the critic 
 himself, an acquaintance with these imperfect ex- 
 pressions of the human spirit is valuable, it must be 
 confessed, after a fashion — as valuable as a famil- 
 iarity with the history of his institutions to the 
 statesman. But in the same manner that the one 
 sort of knowledge is not statesmanship, so the other 
 is not criticism. The critic should be thankful for 
 every scrap of information, no matter how scanty or 
 hardly gained, toward a better understanding of 
 things as they are, of which not the least useful is 
 that which informs him how they came to be so; 
 but the means must not be mistaken for the end — 
 a grasp of the facts for a comprehension of ideas. 
 It is all very well to know the recipe of the pudding; 
 but if we are to avoid mental bewilderment — and
 
 Literature and Criticism 5 
 
 that is perhaps as much as we can expect to do in 
 a world where truth is largely a matter of conven- 
 tion — we must remember that its enjoyment is 
 quite another thing and requires for its expression 
 an entirely different set of terms. 
 
 On the other hand, just as it is necessary to guard 
 against mistaking philological or historical for lit- 
 erary inquiry; so, too, it is equally necessary, in 
 the interests of intellectual clearness, to beware of 
 a like confusion between criticism and some ingen- 
 ious analogy or illustration of the " natural " sci- 
 ences. That the course of literary development fur- 
 nishes a suggestive example of the principles of 
 organic evolution, is undeniable. But undeniably, 
 too, though so serious a mind as Brunetiere has 
 failed to see it, the illustration is biological, not 
 critical. To be sure, though a doctrinaire by dis- 
 position, Brunetiere never succeeded in finding quite 
 so imposing a doctrine and building quite so hard 
 and fast a system about it as Taine did; but some- 
 thing of the sort at least he tried to do with evolu- 
 tion. He observed that the history of literature is, 
 in reality, the history of a succession of ideas of a 
 certain kind, and like every succession of phenom- 
 ena, may be made to take on a resemblance to the 
 processes of organic evolution. That is to say, if 
 a number of things occur in succession, the human 
 mind is bound to make a series of them, supplying 
 the necessary connections and transitions, and gen- 
 eralizing the results in one way or another. In 
 the same manner that a child invents a fairy tale 
 to go with the pictures that interest it, so we, chil- 
 dren of a larger growth, make up a story, sooner
 
 6 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 or later, about the amazing panorama of existence. 
 And it was Brunetiere's special attempt to fit this 
 story of evolution to literature. And after this fash- 
 ion, just as he delights to recognize in letters the 
 familiar phenomena of the differentiation and modi- 
 fication of genres, the growth and transformation 
 and degeneration of species, so we may too, if we 
 please, exercise our ingenuity in trying to show how 
 Dickens's novels grew out of the work which pre- 
 ceded him and how they mingle the romance of 
 Fielding with the sentimentality and realism of 
 Richardson. But after all, that is not what we read 
 Dickens for — if, indeed, amid the constant solicita- 
 tions of modern scholarship we have sufficient lit- 
 erary virtue left to read him at all. Or again, we 
 may amuse ourselves in thinking to surprise the 
 origin of the English novel as a whole in a kind of 
 cross, such as Brunetiere has so much to say about, 
 between the comedy of manners and the social essay, 
 such as Addison wrote, cleverly deducing from the 
 former its turn for modern detail and from the 
 latter its moral seriousness. But to say nothing of 
 the fact that such transitions or transformations are 
 in themselves quite unintelligible and explain noth- 
 ing, this sort of thing yields no just sense of the 
 tragic import of a Clarissa Harlowe. 
 
 And the case is no better with the " psycholog- 
 ical " interpretation of literature than with the 
 " physiological." To be sure, a work of genius is, 
 in a manner, a psychological product as, in another, 
 it is a physiological one. But while such a scien- 
 tific study of genius, as it is pleasantly called, may 
 throw a good deal of light upon the processes of
 
 Literature and Criticism 7 
 
 composition and may even establish a kind of ex- 
 trinsic mechanical order among the phenomena of 
 literature, it fails dismally to express its essence or 
 spirit; and leaving such a residuum, it can not be 
 properly reckoned as criticism. For though liter- 
 ature is to some extent a physical and psychological 
 product, it is to a much greater extent a moral one, 
 of which in the exact sense of words there is no 
 science possible. It is an affair of principle, not of 
 law. What are known nowadays, ridiculously 
 enough, as the moral sciences have to do, as far as 
 they are capable of exact formulation, not with the 
 moral order proper, but only with certain physical 
 manifestations or accompaniments of the moral na- 
 ture. In other respects they are purely descriptive 
 and hence essentially literary in character. How 
 much of the effect of Professor James' Psychology, 
 for instance, depends upon the dexterity of his 
 phrasing! And how much of the contents of any 
 modern psychology consists of ordinary common- 
 places done over into a kind of special jargon or 
 cant — a sort of perverted rhetorical exercise, a 
 misty intellectual algebra! 
 
 For this reason it fares little better with the soci- 
 ological criticism represented by Hennequin, and in 
 a modified and milder dose by Leslie Stephen : 
 
 " If we allow ourselves," says the latter, " to con- 
 template a philosophical history, which shall deal with 
 the causes of events and aim at exhibiting the evolution 
 of human society ... we should also see that the 
 history of literature would be a subordinate element 
 of the whole structure. The political, social, ecclesi- 
 astical, and economical factors, and their complex ac-
 
 8 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tions and reactions, would all have to be taken into 
 account, the literary historian would be concerned with 
 the ideas that find utterance through the poet and phil- 
 osopher, and with the constitution of the class which 
 at any time forms the literary organ of society. The 
 critic who deals with the individual work would find 
 such knowledge necessary to a full appreciation of his 
 subject; and conversely, the appreciation would in 
 some degree help the labourer in other departments of 
 history to understand the nature of the forces which are 
 governing the social development. However far we may 
 be from such a consummation and reluctant to indulge 
 in the magniloquent language which it suggests, I 
 imagine that a literary history is so far satisfactory as 
 it takes the facts into consideration and regards litera- 
 ture, in the perhaps too pretentious phrase, as a partic- 
 ular function of the whole social organism." 
 
 In extension of the same principle Hennequin 
 would transmogrify criticism to the following effect: 
 
 ■nP" A work of art," he says in La Critique Scientifigue, 
 " is a collection of aesthetic means and effects tending 
 to excite emotions which have the following special 
 signs: they are not immediately followed by action; 
 they are formed of a maximum of excitation and a 
 minimum of pain and pleasure; in short, they are dis- 
 interested and an end in themselves. A work of art is 
 a collection of signs revealing the psychological con- 
 stitution of its author; it is a collection of signs reveal- 
 ing the spirit of the admirers whom it expresses, whom 
 it assimilates to its author, and whose disposition it 
 modifies to some degree either because of its nature 
 or species. iEsthopsychology is the science which, 
 making use of the first of these definitions, develops from
 
 Literature and Criticism g 
 
 it the second, third, and fourth; which, starting out in 
 this way, arrives at the analysis, then at the synthesis, 
 then at the complete understanding of one of the two 
 orders of great men, the great artist, and at a vaguer 
 understanding of the vast social groups gathered around 
 him by admiration and similarity. " 
 
 And further, if I may; it is so curious, and so symp- 
 tomatic of a kind of modern mind: 
 
 " iEsthopsychology is, therefore, a science; it has 
 an object, a method, results and problems. An aestho- 
 psychological analysis is composed of three essential 
 parts: an analysis of the components of a piece of work, 
 namely, of that which it expresses and of the manner 
 in which it does so; of a psychophysiological hypothesis 
 which by means of the elements previously disengaged, 
 constructs an image or representation of the conscious- 
 ness of which they are the sign, and which establishes, 
 if possible, the physiological in correlation with the 
 psychological; and finally a third step in which the 
 analyst, setting aside the insufficient theory of the race 
 and milieu, which is exact only) for primitive literary 
 and social periods, and considering the work itself as 
 a sign of those whom it pleases, while remembering 
 that it is also a sign of its author, infers the former from 
 the latter. " 
 
 To Hennequin's mind, therefore, and to some less 
 extent to Leslie Stephen's also, literature is merely 
 a form or mode of social expression, in which so- 
 ciety, working through the individual author, records 
 its own psychology at a particular moment or period 
 of its history, so that criticism becomes a kind of 
 Volkspsychologie, as the Germans call it, and the
 
 io Romance and Tragedy 
 
 author himself a mere transmitter or mouthpiece. 
 In measure, of course, the contention is correct. 
 In some manner a book is undoubtedly the outcome 
 of a certain society and may be explained to some 
 degree in function of the society contemporaneous 
 with it. Such was Taine's idea, which, narrow and 
 inelastic as it was, was at least more liberal than 
 the dogmas of most of his successors. At best, 
 however, society is but the condition, and like all 
 conditions, does not originate but influences. To 
 say nothing of the merely empirical objection that it 
 is often the author who is, in all seeming, the first 
 to divine and rescue truth and is frequently obliged 
 to impose himself upon his audience if he would be 
 heard at all, so that he appears rather to form his 
 public than to be formed by it — it is evident, in 
 addition, that a work of literature in the strict sense 
 of the word is something exceptional by its very 
 nature. It is the difference — or as we still say, 
 rather condescendingly, the genius — which gives 
 the book its value. It is not the newspapers which 
 constitute the literature of a period. Mere unison, 
 what everybody is saying, as well as imitation, re- 
 production, repetition, fail to count. " There is 
 nothing in the drama of Rotrou," says Brunetiere. 
 " which is not to be found in that of Corneille; if 
 the work of the former did not exist, there would 
 be nothing lacking to the history of our theatre . . . 
 and that is why his tragi-comedies may interest a 
 few of the curious, but have not a place in the his- 
 tory of French literature." Only the contribution, 
 the distinctively personal vision, is of any permanent 
 importance — and it is the work of permanent im-
 
 Literature and Criticism n 
 
 portance alone which is properly literature, since 
 literature is obviously literature by virtue of its 
 message to us who read it and not by virtue of its 
 expression of local and temporal peculiarities. Pope 
 is still poetry, not because he voices the ideals of 
 Anne — it is just in as far as he follows the fashion 
 of his day that he has been repudiated — but be- 
 cause he voices certain ideas that humanity would 
 not willingly forego: 
 
 " And sure, if aught below the seats divine 
 Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine, 
 A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried, 
 Above all pain, all anger, and all pride, 
 The rage of power, the blast of public breath, 
 The lust of lucre, and the dread of death. " 
 
 It is sentiments like these, the sense of human dig- 
 nity, that still constitute Pope a poet, not the Dun- 
 ciad; while, on the other hand, Addison, the image 
 of his time, is only less of a classic by that very fact. 
 Of this theory Paul Albert, himself one of its 
 more unsystematic advocates, has such an amusingly 
 inadvertent refutation that I can not refrain from 
 quoting it. " Before all," he says of criticism, " the 
 first thing to seek in a work is what makes its life, 
 what is the soul of it. But how to discover this with- 
 out replacing the work in the milieu where it was 
 produced, without reconstructing the religious, so- 
 cial, and political life of the peoples who saw it born? 
 It is because the work was in intimate harmony 
 with the society for which it was made that it is 
 thought beautiful." Very well. But in another
 
 12 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 moment, when brought face to face with the reality, 
 how easily and unconsciously he relinquishes a con- 
 tention untenable in fact! A propos of Moliere he 
 declares that " genuine art is a happy mixture of 
 the particular and the general, of the real and the 
 ideal. By many traits of detail Harpagon and Tar- 
 tuffe properly belong to the seventeenth century; 
 the total of their physiogonomy consists, however, 
 of types of all times and all countries." Precisely 
 so. That is the distinction to which the " sociolo- 
 gist " himself is finally driven between great litera- 
 ture and small — its relative persistency. It is still 
 literature by its appeal for us who read it now, not 
 by its appeal for those who read it in the past. In- 
 disputably Sophocles is an Athenian as Shakespeare 
 is an Elizabethan; and their plays are full of local 
 and temporal allusions and insinuations that we 
 nowadays find it difficult or even impossible to un- 
 derstand or detect — for it is extremely doubtful 
 whether we ever see in the past, with all the assist- 
 ance that scholarship can give, just what was seen 
 by its contemporaries; so that if Sophocles and 
 Shakespeare were nothing more than Athenian and 
 Elizabethan, they would not be literature. While, 
 on the other hand, it is more than probable, that we 
 have come to admire them for many a quality which 
 their own generation and, indeed, they themselves 
 never suspected. For it is only as they yield a 
 meaning or significance for posterity, as they assist 
 their successors to a better comprehension of life, 
 that they continue to be literature. They are lit- 
 erature only as they are explicable, not in terms of 
 some other subject or interest, but immediately and
 
 Literature and Criticism 13 
 
 for themselves, and as they have succeeded in sur- 
 viving the society in which they arose, while their 
 literary characteristics are those which remain when 
 the peculiarities of such a society are abstracted. 
 Even Taine himself is compelled in the end to grade 
 the arts in accordance with the duration of the 
 fashions which they commemorate. In a word, 
 literature is literature by virtue of some exceptional 
 and permanent significance; any discussion which 
 fails to bring out this appeal or which, instead of 
 bringing it out, substitutes other concerns, such as 
 philology or evolution or psychology or sociology, 
 is irrelevant from the point of view of criticism. I 
 do not say that such a discussion may not be fruit- 
 ful — that it may not assist us in understanding 
 Sophocles' significance of Shakespeare's; but the 
 main thing critically is that significance, and what- 
 ever is not concerned immediately with that signifi- 
 cance, is not criticism. 
 
 In a sort, no doubt, the biographical criticism, so 
 much affected by Sainte-Beuve, is in much the 
 same case : 
 
 " In the range of criticism and literary history, " so 
 he expresses himself about it, " there is no reading, it 
 seems to me, more entertaining, enjoyable, and at the 
 same time instructive in every way, than good lives of 
 great men; not shallow and dry biographies, scanty 
 and yet pretentious notices, where the writer thinks 
 only of shining and where every paragraph is pointed 
 with an epigram. I mean broad, copious, even diffuse 
 histories of a man and his works; biographies that enter 
 into an author, produce him under all his different 
 aspects, make him live, speak, move as he must have
 
 14 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 done in life; follow him into his home, into his domestic 
 manners and customs, as far as possible; connect him 
 on all sides with this earth, with real existence, those 
 everyday habits on which great men depend no less 
 than the rest of us; in short the actual foundation on 
 which they stand, from which they rise to greater heights 
 at times, and to which they fall back constantly." 
 
 To be sure, a study of the author's life comes nearer 
 to the springs of his inspiration than does any of 
 the other studies that I have mentioned. But all the 
 same the impertinence, though more subtle, is still 
 impertinence. In any case, what gives the writer 
 his sole interest for criticism is his book. If he 
 happens to be more remarkable as a character, he 
 belongs on that side to history, not literature. Oth- 
 erwise, the light by which he shines is reflected and 
 has its source in his writing, where it may best be 
 sought, not in his life. I am tempted even to say 
 that a book which requires a knowledge of its maker 
 for its enjoyment is necessarily of an inferior order. 
 It is no particular recommendation that so much of 
 Swift's work begins and ends with Swift. Even 
 Goethe himself is open, in many instances, to the 
 same reproach; to some extent he has allowed him- 
 self to become subdued to the tyranny of his own 
 being. But then Goethe is by all odds a more 
 significant figure as a human being than as an 
 artist. An intimate acquaintance with the personal 
 peculiarities and doings of authors is recognized, and 
 correctly so, as the property of the special student 
 rather than of the general or cultivated reader. 
 There is felt to be something technical and profes- 
 sional about it. To think otherwise is to confound
 
 Literature and Criticism 15 
 
 literature with life. The hero, the statesman — and 
 the poet too, it may be — belong in part to the 
 world, whose recorder and critic is the historian; 
 the poem alone belongs to literature. And while it 
 is well that the literary critic, zealous of every side- 
 light, should know his man too, yet his task is 
 largely a special one and requires an amount of 
 scaffolding quite incommensurate with the size of 
 his edifice when finished. And so it is — to put a 
 term to my enormity at once — that there are times 
 when in reading Sainte-Beuve I am filled with im- 
 patience at the frequent obtrusion of the writer's 
 private preoccupations and the constant exhibition 
 of the critic's workshop. 
 
 Nevertheless, I would not go to the other extreme, 
 as many do, and because literature can not be wholly 
 contained by an exact terminology, protest that 
 criticism is nothing more than an account of the 
 manner in which a book happens to strike us individ- 
 ually. In this view — the view of Anatole France 
 and Walter Pater — the taste for literature is en- 
 tirely an affair of personal liking; criticism is al- 
 together capricious, illogical, and unreasonable — 
 a story of adventure in a library; the only thing 
 that can be said with certainty about a piece of 
 writing is that we do or do not care for it. But 
 not only is this impressionism as erroneous as any 
 of the other conceptions of which I have spoken, it 
 is, if anything, more vicious because it is more licen- 
 tious and unprincipled. For even though literature 
 is not amenable to scientific formulation, it does not 
 follow by any means that criticism is wanton and 
 unscrupulous.
 
 1 6 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Life, for instance, eludes as a whole the symmet- 
 rical categories of science for the reason that it 
 belongs in large part to another order — to the 
 moral, not to the physical order with which science 
 deals. And yet the irreducible discriminations of 
 the individual consciousness are subject after a fash- 
 ion to principle though not to law — so much so 
 that there is nothing more contemptuous than to 
 call a man unprincipled. At all events, though our 
 actions may be unprognosticable, we are able at 
 least to give them some kind of consistency, to jus- 
 tify or excuse them on general considerations after 
 the fact. But our impression of a book is, after all, 
 only a portion of our mental life, as the book itself 
 is of its author's, and is naturally constituted in the 
 same manner as the rest of the experience to which 
 it belongs. While literature, further, is a repre- 
 sentation or more broadly a treatment of life as a 
 whole and consists of the various conceptions or 
 visions or interpretations, not of the life of a partic- 
 ular time or age exclusively, but of the life of human- 
 ity at large, including not merely its active or ob- 
 jective life — its manners, customs, and usages — 
 but also its inner or conscious life — its thought, 
 emotion, and reflection; and its author's merit is 
 measured by the value which his view of these mat- 
 ters has for the race. Is his view of life conformable 
 with moral experience, is it elevated and sustaining, 
 does it help to free us from the tyranny of ap- 
 pearance and of the phenomenal, does it aid us to 
 bear misfortune and prosperity, injustice and flat- 
 tery, does it strengthen and confirm our spirit and 
 save us from ourselves; then it is good literature and
 
 Literature and Criticism 17 
 
 a permanent contribution to human culture. For 
 however it may be with the physical world with 
 which science undertakes to deal — whether its 
 order be inherent or imputed; it has been necessary 
 at all events for man to organize for himself the 
 moral world, the world in which he lives the most. 
 The knowledge of himself and of his proper aim and 
 activity, the distinction between the human and the 
 brute, the sense of a social nature, of principle and 
 duty, of right and wrong, even the feeling for seem- 
 liness and beauty — all these acquirements have 
 been the result of a long and uncertain development, 
 the contribution of many hands. To be sure, there 
 is confusion enough as it is. But these acquisitions 
 of the human spirit, these partial dispersals of chaos, 
 have been confirmed and perpetuated by literature, 
 which, even if it has not created the moral illusion, 
 has given it form and currency. 
 
 It is for this reason that any serious discussion 
 of literature should have to do, first of all, with the 
 conception of life included in the work — not with 
 life alone, for literature is not life itself but its 
 reflection in a consciousness essentially moral; and 
 not the book alone, for the book is merely the record 
 of a reflection — but with the relation between the 
 two, or in other words, with the attitude of litera- 
 ture to life. Should this relation be broad and gen- 
 eral, as in the case of an entire national literature 
 like the Greek, or rather more restrictedly, of some 
 large literary movement like German romanticism: 
 then the criticism will be broad and general too and 
 will aim to show the manner in which this national 
 literature as a whole or this literary movement as
 
 1 8 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 a whole has confronted the problem of existence. 
 Or the relation may be narrow and particular or 
 even individual, as in the case of a single author like 
 Shakespeare; and under these circumstances the 
 criticism, adapting itself to the subject, will become 
 individual too and will have to show what Shakes- 
 peare answered to the most pressing questions which 
 life proposes. Naturally, such a criticism will not 
 expect of literature a replica or pastiche of actuality. 
 It will look rather for the harmonious adjustments 
 of the human spirit, the establishment of a rhythmic 
 conscious order among the promiscuous elements of 
 experience. And in so doing, it will have no hesi- 
 tation in calling in assistance from any department 
 of investigation that is likely to throw a light upon 
 the matter — whether physiological, psychological, 
 sociological, or what not; though it will try to avoid 
 mistaking such answers as it may get from these 
 sources for answers to its principal inquiry. And 
 inasmuch as the life which is both the subject and 
 object of literature, is neither scientific nor yet un- 
 principled but broadly moral; our criticism will be 
 neither scientific nor impressionistic, but will con- 
 sist in a free play of the intelligence just as life 
 does. It will be based on general principles, which, 
 though elastic, are broader than the observation of 
 a single case, and which are capable of being ex- 
 plained and justified, as our conduct is, rationally 
 and intelligibly, if nothing more. 
 
 Now, if these considerations are just, though only 
 in a limited and partial measure, it would seem to 
 be high time that criticism were busying itself with 
 the foundations of such a study — or were at least
 
 Literature and Criticism 19 
 
 establishing certain common grounds or postulates 
 to which its conclusions might be referred with the 
 effect of ending all critical divergencies or at least 
 of justifying their existence. In comparison with 
 the age and the pretensions of the subject is it not 
 astounding that there is yet so little substantial 
 agreement with regard to the significance and ration- 
 ale of the simplest literary phenomena? To all 
 appearance it is still impossible for any two critics 
 to agree as to the proper relation in general of 
 literature to life, as it is to appeal to any accepted 
 canon by way of settling their disputes. One opin- 
 ion proceeds on the assumption that literature and 
 life are or should be identical; another, that they 
 are diverse, though without venturing to define the 
 difference. Of the former party, one assumes that 
 it is the closeness of the imitation that makes lit- 
 erature; another, that it is the technical skill, the 
 trick of style, the verbal coquetry of the rendering. 
 Of a stanza of Browning's Lover's Quarrel, which 
 retails the heroine's costumes, Mr. Chesterton ob- 
 serves that it " would almost serve as an order to 
 a dressmaker and is therefore poetry," while a re 
 viewer cites the remark as an amusing illustration 
 of Mr. Chesterton's ignorance of the very nature 
 of poetry. But Mr. Chesterton is either right or 
 wrong. If he is wrong, there should be some 
 way of bringing him to terms. If he is right, 
 there should be some way of silencing his detractors. 
 It is scandalous that at this time of day a man may 
 make any statement about the rudiments of litera- 
 ture without fear of shame or ridicule. Is there 
 another subject of consequence in which such reck-
 
 20 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 lessness would be tolerated, much more applauded 
 as though it were an admired qualification in an 
 authority? 
 
 And yet this is a problem which lies at the very 
 roots of criticism; for how is it possible to determine 
 the merits or even the character of a piece of work 
 while the aim and intention of its existence are 
 uncertain? How can we form an opinion about a 
 literary product before we know what literature in 
 general ought to do — or at all events what it actu- 
 ally has done? Nor is the problem insoluble, much 
 as the factiousness of modern criticism may have 
 embroiled it. At least there ought to be compara- 
 tively little difficulty in stating it fairly, even though 
 it may not be possible all at once to reconcile indi- 
 vidual prejudices or preferences for one literary posi- 
 tion rather than another. Community of opinion in 
 all such matters is, like every work of construction, 
 an affair of slow and laborious cultivation. Right 
 reason gradually prevails; a canon finally develops. 
 But it must be preceded by copious discussion, by 
 a clear recognition and exhibition from every side 
 of all the facts in their proper character.
 
 THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC 
 
 IN THE " Postscript " to his Appreciations Walter 
 Pater has undertaken, albeit rather light-heart- 
 edly, a task of the first importance. Not only does 
 he pretend, like most modern critics, to distinguish 
 literature in a loose and general way as classic and 
 romantic, and to explain its most violent contrasts 
 as the expression of an irreconcilable antinomy in 
 human nature; he also proposes to examine the two 
 parties to the dispute in hopes of determining their 
 essential character and significance. As for the 
 division itself, that is patent, he considers, on the 
 very surface of literature in a stricter and more 
 traditional tendency and a freer and more innovat- 
 ing or radical one. The poetry of Pope is very dif- 
 ferent from that of Shakespeare; the former is 
 marked by an instinct of contraction, the latter by 
 an instinct of expansion. And it is not difficult to 
 see that every author, taken as the term of a similar 
 comparison, is actuated by one impulse or the other. 
 Racine, to be sure, is not very much like Pope; but 
 as contrasted with Calderon, he evidently practises 
 a severer and more formal art, he is more restrained 
 and forbearing. While in the same way that one 
 writer is less exuberant than another and assumes 
 a more reserved attitude toward life, so too one 
 literature or one period of literature will evince the 
 same disposition more strikingly than some other
 
 22 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 literature or period. French as a whole has always 
 been more cautious than English; while in English 
 the age of Dryden was much more contained than 
 that of Tennyson and Browning, and in French 
 again the age of Louis XIV was one of reservation 
 par excellence. 
 
 To be sure, such instances do not go very far or 
 burrow very deep. It is true that the writers of 
 modern times may be readily grouped into two 
 classes as they have looked at life more directly 
 and immediately and as they have looked at it 
 through the medium of books and previous interpre- 
 tation. At the same time, it is difficult — or rather, 
 impossible — for any one to write nowadays without 
 being conscious of his predecessors and without 
 being seriously affected by their example. The 
 ghosts of our ancestors haunt and coerce us; and al- 
 most imperceptibly we find ourselves yielding to 
 their silent but persistent influence. It is we who are 
 the ancients; and at first thought it would seem 
 as though we were fatally bound over to authority 
 by virtue of our historical position, in spite of the 
 startling accumulation of new fact which works 
 constantly to distract and dilate our minds, while 
 the contrary appears the case with ^schylus and 
 Sophocles — they had not to resist the tyranny of 
 tradition, even though life might have been in itself 
 less varied and clamorous for them than it is for 
 us. At all events, they saw it as independently as 
 Shakespeare and Calderon, and what they saw was 
 equally perplexing and disquieting. And yet it is 
 they who have come to be reckoned the representa- 
 tives of literary conservatism.
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 23 
 
 But superficial as these examples may be and 
 far as they are from touching bottom, they do at 
 least serve to illustrate what is so much a matter of 
 general consciousness that every modern critic of 
 any competence has recognized it in whole or in 
 part, under one name or another — ancient and 
 modern, naive and sentimental, objective and inter- 
 esting, pure and ornate, expressive and suggestive, 
 Apollonian and Dionysian — the existence, namely, 
 of two distinct and contradictory views of the poet's 
 function and its exercise, dividing the field of lit- 
 erature, regardless of minor irregular bickerings, 
 into two opposed and irreconcilable camps, which 
 have finally come by common usage to be distin- 
 guished, rather loosely if conveniently, as classic and 
 romantic. 
 
 To the continued use of these current terms in 
 such a broad and inclusive sense to denote a uni- 
 versal distinction, not as between an uncertain better 
 and worse, but as between two more or less incom- 
 mensurable literary denominations, there is at pres- 
 ent one serious drawback. Like most handy and 
 suggestive words which are not the peculiar prop- 
 erty of some technical study these terms have been 
 appropriated to so many partial and particular uses, 
 to say nothing of their laxer and more popular 
 employments, and have finally developed so many 
 implications and associations that they have become 
 a kind of intellectual stumbling-block and source of 
 misunderstanding, not only in ordinary speech, but 
 also in criticism. And as Pater, in spite of something 
 like an implicit promise, has failed to disentangle 
 the snarl of meanings in which they are now involved
 
 24 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 — has been, indeed, like most critics, less interested 
 in doing so than in adding another kink of his own, 
 and setting out to clear up the confusion, has, if 
 anything, further embroiled it; it may be excusable, 
 under the circumstances, to attempt the task anew 
 in the mere hope of dispelling a little of all this 
 verbal perplexity and without the pretension to in- 
 crease the number of definitions with which the 
 subject is already encumbered. 
 
 Derivatively, classic signifies obviously enough 
 that which forms a class or order; and hence 
 as applied to literature, it comes to refer to any 
 acknowledged model or example of excellence. In 
 this broad and general acceptation, which may be 
 designated for convenience as the popular meaning 
 of the word, every literature has its own classics 
 irrespectively — English, French, German, and 
 Spanish, as well as Greek and Latin; and Shake- 
 speare and Calderon are, without further reserves, 
 as fairly classics as Sophocles and Virgil, although 
 they differ so widely in spirit and method. And 
 however the word may be applied, or in whatever 
 connection it is used, it still raises, to the prejudice 
 of romanticism, a faint but perceptible reminiscence 
 of this primary notion of standard and pattern merit, 
 as when Goethe remarks simply that classic is sound, 
 romantic unsound literature. 
 
 In order to understand the secondary meaning of 
 the term in literary usage it is necessary only to re-
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 25 
 
 member that modern literature is a flower of recent 
 growth. Three hundred and fifty years ago there 
 was little or nothing of it in existence. Or if there 
 were standing a few of those great monuments which 
 now loom so gigantic on our horizon, they were by 
 no means the objects of deferential admiration and 
 emulation which they have since become. To our 
 earlier critics as to those of the Renaissance the 
 standard, the class-forming writings were Latin and 
 Greek. They were the classics, the paradigms of 
 all expression. As such they have formed, until 
 recent years, the basis of study in college and uni- 
 versity, and have perpetuated this particular sense 
 of the term so that still among students and 
 scholars and even among the intelligent general pub- 
 lic classic is used of Greek and Latin literature as 
 much as of anything. Whence this may not be im- 
 properly styled the academic acceptation of the 
 word. 
 
 But the conception undergoes a further change. 
 By a natural abstraction the same term comes to be 
 applied, not merely to Greek and Latin literature in 
 particular, but to the spirit in general illustrated in 
 these literatures. It refers, not only to Sophocles' 
 tragedy and Virgil's epic, but also to such qualities, 
 wherever found, as are characteristic of these works 
 — notably an extreme susceptibility to the moral 
 significance of the subject, resulting externally in a 
 sense for order, balance, moderation, measure, and 
 the like — in short, to a certain easily recognizable 
 manner of conceiving and rendering life. For these 
 general characters, as disassociated from any partic- 
 ular age or race, classic becomes a handy designation
 
 26 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 and may be appropriated to any writer or group of 
 writers so marked, no matter what the period or 
 language. In this, which may be labelled the critical 
 sense of the word, it has become permissible to say 
 in a general way that Pope and Addison in English, 
 Racine and Voltaire in French, and Goethe in Ger- 
 man are all classic, because they display more 
 or less consistently certain peculiarities which find 
 their clearest expression in Greek and Latin. And 
 it is permissible also to add that French literature is, 
 on the whole, more classic than English or German, 
 because it has made so much more of these qualities. 
 And it is permissible even to speak of Shakespeare 
 himself as classic in some respects and of Goethe as 
 sometimes classic and sometimes not according as 
 either seems animated by this spirit or another. And 
 finally it may be said that a given period or a given 
 school is classic as it is remarkable for such a dis- 
 position, like the age of Anne in English or Louis 
 XIV in French. 
 
 Of course, it is a misrepresentation, though not 
 an uncommon one among romanticists, to speak as 
 though Pope and Goethe and Racine were classic 
 because they imitated the Greeks or the Romans, 
 or even because they wrote something like them. 
 That is not the idea. A writer is classic, not because 
 he writes like some one else, but because he writes 
 in a certain spirit, because he maintains a certain 
 attitude toward life. Whenever this spirit makes 
 itself apparent in an author or a period or a litera- 
 ture, there we have a classic author or period or 
 literature. To be sure, the writings in which this 
 spirit attains its purest and most perfect expression
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 27 
 
 belong to the past — as do Shakespeare and Cal- 
 deron for that matter; though the romanticists have 
 not been slow to emphasize this suggestion of age 
 and decrepitude, to which the word so easily lends 
 itself, as an offset to the notion of standard per- 
 fection implicit in its popular use. Properly, the 
 classical character is intermittent; it is neither ar- 
 chaic nor obsolete, but reappears at every revival of 
 the great tradition of culture, though since the 
 French Revolution it has ceased to influence any 
 important portion of our civilization. And further, 
 since every modern classic has looked to Greek orig- 
 inals or their Latin reflections for encouragement 
 or inspiration, it is the modern habit to speak as 
 though imitation and conventionality were invari- 
 able principles of classicism. Such an imputation, 
 however, belongs to the word only in certain of its 
 narrower and more controversial definitions. The 
 classicism of Dryden and Pope was undoubtedly 
 imitative and conventional pretty nearly by defini- 
 tion; so were almost all the romantic recommence- 
 ments, which threw back to Shakespeare much more 
 impudently than the classicists to Sophocles or Eurip- 
 ides. It is infinitely amusing to find Stendhal re- 
 proving his countrymen for their slavish imitation 
 of Racine and exhorting them in the same breath to 
 mimic Shakespeare. After all, imitation and con- 
 vention are partly unfortunate effects of chronolog- 
 ical position and generic decadence, and do not 
 affect the essential nature of either party; for I 
 suppose that it will be readily conceded that Shake- 
 speare and Sophocles are as original the one as the 
 other, while Calderon illustrates the process of con-
 
 28 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 ventional petrifaction as convincingly as Dryden or 
 Pope, if not more so. 
 
 To distinguish a little more carefully, therefore, 
 the assumption of the term by those who have under- 
 taken of set purpose to imitate or reproduce the 
 models of Greek or Latin literature or what they 
 have regarded as the essential qualities of these lit- 
 eratures or of classicism in general, must be con- 
 sidered as a kind of misappropriation. In this use 
 the word is identical with what is more properly 
 known as pseudo-classicism and covers not only such 
 tragedy as Ponsard's and Delavigne's but much of 
 Voltaire's also. Undoubtedly, an excess or abuse 
 or misapplication or falsification of classicism, in- 
 clining to dryness, rigidity, and stultification, were 
 to be viewed as pseudo-classic in a close discrimi- 
 nation. In any case, these deviations of classicism 
 have their pendant in the various schools of romanti- 
 cism, each of which has insisted in a somewhat simi- 
 lar fashion upon some one set of romantic characters 
 to the exclusion of others and has given in this way a 
 particular turn to the romantic spirit. At the same 
 time there is always something romantic in every ro- 
 mantic school. They are both estuaries of their re- 
 spective oceans. And bad as pseudo-classicism may 
 sometimes be, it contains at worst a little classic 
 leaven, as the romantic schools at best are always 
 infected with the general romantic virus. 
 
 The word romantic has suffered a series of vicis- 
 situdes even more bewildering than those of classic. 
 Popularly it designates whatever succeeds in com- 
 bining with a certain charm or fascination the un-
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 29 
 
 usual, the irregular, the striking, and the exceptional. 
 In the first instance, it seems to have derived this 
 popular significance from its association with the 
 corrupt dialects of the Latin and the vernaculars 
 which grew out of them, in exact parallelism with 
 the modern philological use of romance. Any writ- 
 ing composed in one of these vernaculars would be 
 romantic in distinction from a composition in classic 
 Latin. But from the very character of these " ro- 
 mances " with their lax sense of moral reality and 
 their vagrancy of imagination the adjective comes 
 to cover the abstract qualities so embodied, as in the 
 popular use of the word ; while on the other hand, it 
 would naturally be transferred to any writing or 
 group of writings which might cultivate such a 
 general manner or propose to imitate or revive the 
 spirit of these productions. Such is A. W. Schlegel's 
 account of the matter: " By the word romantic, 
 romance, were designated the new dialects which 
 arose from the mixture of Latin with the tongues of 
 the German conquerors — hence the compositions 
 written therein were called romances; whence is 
 derived the term romantic, and the character of this 
 poetry consists in the amalgamation of old German 
 with the later or christianized Roman, so that its 
 elements are already indicated by its names." In 
 such fashion the name was assumed by the romantic 
 school in Germany, which aimed more or less de- 
 liberately at a resuscitation of mediaevalism — or 
 better, perhaps, at a substitution of national antiq- 
 uity and tradition for a foreign and humanistic one 
 — as well as by those of France and England — if 
 England may be said properly to have had a roman-
 
 30 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tic school — which had their eyes to some extent on 
 mediaeval subjects if not on mediaeval ideals. 
 
 And still further, on the strength of a similar 
 etymology, the German romanticists, under the lead- 
 ership of Friedrich Schlegel, tried to make out an 
 affiliation between romanticism and romance in the 
 later sense, Roman, and to establish the more roman- 
 tic forms of the novel, itself the putative successor 
 of the " romance," as the type and pattern of roman- 
 tic literature. " And so," in the words of A. W. 
 Schlegel, " the romance [Roman] . . . stands fore- 
 most in the newer poetry — a genre which is capable 
 of representing the whole thereof. We shall see that 
 the great modern dramatists — yes, the entire form 
 of our drama, must be judged on the principle of the 
 romance." Nor is the relation solely a fanciful one, 
 if the attention is fixed on what we now call ro- 
 mance as distinguished from novel, which has been 
 sobered and " classicized " to a great extent by the 
 influence of the drama, something as the rough com- 
 edy of the Greeks was chastened by the example of 
 their tragedy. 
 
 On the other hand, the French critics have come 
 to consider that the perfecting of their classic trag- 
 edy consisted in the retrenchment of romantic ele- 
 ments and a consequent separation from romance 
 with which it was at first entangled. To speak 
 exactly, then, and with the double shading of the 
 word romance in mind, there is, as a matter of fact, 
 only one tragedy, the French itself and the Greek, 
 which arrived at the same result in another way. 
 All other tragedy contains a greater or less admix- 
 ture of romance, in the shape at least of epical,
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 31 
 
 " chronicle," or " heroic " elements. To be sure, 
 the dramatic genre, even at its loosest appears in 
 itself more classical, by virtue of its superior organi- 
 zation, than does narrative or " story " of any kind, 
 as is evident from a comparison of As You Like It 
 with Lodge's Rosalind, or of Julius Ccesar with 
 North's Plutarch, or even of Fielding's comedies 
 with his Tom Jones. But still irregular tragedy — 
 or for that matter romantic drama as a whole — 
 represents a relatively undifferentiated form. In 
 Shakespeare and Calderon, for example, the essen- 
 tial character of chronicle and heroic poem is often 
 so obtrusive that it can not be overlooked, even 
 with the best will in the world, not only in scenario 
 but in movement and plot, to say nothing of theme. 
 Indeed, in Calderon the play is regularly nothing 
 more than a romance cut up into lengths for the 
 stage; while this is exactly the direction of Shake- 
 speare's decadence in The Winter's Tale and Cym- 
 beline, which like our current dramatized novels have 
 lost again the sense of a partly achieved distinction 
 and relapsed into an imperfectly differentiated rudi- 
 ment. In this way tragedy and romance become the 
 typical genres of classic and romantic literature, re- 
 spectively, and serve by their varying proportions to 
 indicate the prevalence of one spirit or the other. 
 
 Such, then, is what may be called the controversial 
 significance of the term romantic ; for in some or all 
 of these meanings it has been used by the promoters 
 of certain programmes, to whose efforts, particularly 
 those of the Germans, is due much of the confusion 
 with which the word is covered. Such programmes 
 find their counterpart in special classic movements
 
 32 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 like that of Dryden and that especially against 
 which Lessing raised the banner of revolt. The 
 point is that they are all aberrations as well of the 
 romantic as of the classic spirit. In spite of the 
 similarity of the name, the work and the significance 
 of these schools are quite different. And since in the 
 case of romanticism in particular each has used the 
 term irresponsibly to clothe its own notions, there 
 has resulted a bewildering and contradictory set of 
 associations connected with a single word. 
 
 On the whole, however, it has always been the 
 disposition, if not the immediate purpose, of a move- 
 ment of this kind to break with the great tradition of 
 human culture and to reassert the merely national 
 and popular extraction. Indeed, with A. W. Schle- 
 gel eigentumlich and romantic are synonyms. And 
 as the tradition of culture originates with Greece 
 and as the purely national and popular genealogy 
 has its roots in medievalism, romanticism as an 
 eccentric movement comes sooner or later to appear 
 as the opponent of humanism and a restorer of bar- 
 barism. Such a performance is strikingly illustrated 
 in the volte face of Friederich Schlegel, who began 
 as a classicist and Grecian and ended as a medieval- 
 ist and Roman Catholic. In the case of German 
 romanticism as a whole this attempt to revive medi- 
 evalism was from an early date comparatively self- 
 conscious and perverse, and resulted in a certain 
 carelessness of the permanent acquirements of hu- 
 man culture and a discontent with the real basis of 
 human sanity, which was as dangerous as it was un- 
 Greek. Though in France, on the other hand, ro- 
 manticism has always preserved a specious air of rel-
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 33 
 
 ative sanity and moderation — it is necessary only to 
 contrast the comparative lucidity of Rousseau with 
 the turgidity of the Schlegels to see the difference 
 — I doubt whether its influence has been any less 
 mischievous. And while both schools may be con- 
 sidered dead as such, they have infected the litera- 
 ture and criticism of posterity to such an extent that 
 they are still the most active elements of our intel- 
 lectual life to-day. 
 
 Indeed, it is just this insidiousness which makes 
 the danger of a vigorous romantic propaganda — 
 the encouragement it gives to the barbaric and cha- 
 otic elements latent in every civilization — the 
 vagueness, disorder, and turbidity into which hu- 
 manity is liable to relapse but of which the Greek 
 was the most obstinate enemy that has ever existed. 
 As a matter of fact, every interruption or suspension 
 of his culture has been followed by a romantic 
 upheaval. I need hardly mention medievalism it- 
 self; I need only take the most formidable shock 
 which culture has suffered since the Renaissance — 
 the French Revolution, succeeded as it was by the 
 romantic agitation of Europe. Nor does it require 
 very keen eyes to see that we ourselves are menaced 
 by three apparitions which look like so many reve- 
 nants of the three great institutions of the Middle 
 Ages and which are in fact nothing but the three 
 great rivals of humanism whatever form they may 
 happen to take from time to time. In the first place 
 our incipient socialism is a kind of transmogrified 
 feudalism, a reincarnation of the principle that the 
 individual exists for the state rather than the state 
 for the individual; for it is indifferent after all what
 
 34 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 kind of tyrant we serve, king or demos, whether we 
 build great communistic cathedrals or railway sta- 
 tions. Our technicality, too, or specialism, with its 
 distrust of the free intelligence and its reduction 
 of every interest, even history and literary criticism, 
 to the exercise of rigid methodism, is only another 
 manifestation of the spirit which once expressed 
 itself in scholasticism. And finally our religiosity 
 as exemplified in spiritism of one kind and another, 
 what is it but a survival of the mortal superstition 
 which formerly found sanctuary in the mediaeval 
 church with its myriad hagiology and wonder-mon- 
 gering? If there were to be to-day a serious outbreak 
 of romantic fervour, it is these elements that we 
 should find vigorously exploited and glorified as we 
 do find them feebly and ineffectually celebrated in 
 our present feeble and ineffectual literature. 
 
 But however this may be, it is clear that these 
 several romantic schools agree in one respect — in 
 their opposition to classicism of any kind, so that the 
 name becomes still further generalized, particularly 
 under the criticism of the Schlegels, to include any 
 work of literature or any writer who is opposed to 
 classicism, just as the romance languages are con- 
 trasted with classic Latin, either by temperament or 
 on principle. Hence, if classic be supposed to re- 
 sume the spirit illustrated by ancient literature, then 
 romantic will embrace all that literature which has 
 grown up in independence or in ignorance or in 
 defiance or in neglect of that spirit. In some such 
 fashion, the word comes finally by one detour and 
 another to denote the antithesis of classic and to 
 imply another disposition of spirit altogether. Such
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 35 
 
 is what I should like to call the critical significance 
 of the word. A susceptibility to irregular beauty, 
 a fondness for the striking and the unusual even at 
 the expense of regularity and order, a preference 
 for fascinating detail above symmetry and propor- 
 tion, a predilection for the coruscations of style — 
 for the glittering word and phrase, for the exotic 
 and exquisite epithet, for everything that touches 
 and thrills and dazzles, a hunger for sensation, even 
 when these desires lead to a dissipation of the atten- 
 tion — such are its external qualities as far as it is 
 profitable to analyse them at present. 
 
 11 
 
 Finally, then, if the various side-issues and in- 
 cidental associations raised by the words be 
 disregarded, classic and romantic in their broadest 
 and most fundamental usage, that which I have ven- 
 tured to call the critical, are seen to involve the 
 recognition of a single great split or cleavage affect- 
 ing in a general way the whole body of literature 
 and dividing it into two factions or parties. What- 
 ever confusion, ambiguity, or vagueness may be 
 noticeable in their special or narrower attributions 
 or in their conflicting suggestions and implications, 
 they still testify to the underlying consciousness of 
 an irreducible opposition of poetic temper and atti- 
 tude into which all differences of literary conception 
 and manner finally resolve and which is illustrated 
 most clearly at its extremes in a comparison of 
 Greek and modern literature and their representa-
 
 36 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tive authors and genres, Sophocles and Shakespeare, 
 tragedy and romance. 
 
 With the bare recognition of the fact, however, 
 unanimity ceases. As far as it is seen to imply a 
 principle of literary classification and discrimination, 
 the authority of criticism has been exerted, on the 
 whole, for the greater part of a century, to trouble 
 and obscure the clear perception of its real charac- 
 ter and significance. In spite of the bankruptcy 
 of the school, it is amazing how much of its present 
 capital criticism owes to the German romanticists 
 without even seeming to be aware of the character 
 of the debt or even the circumstance of the obli- 
 gation. In the words of a German man of letters, 
 " the history of literature can sum up its judgment 
 of the Schlegel brothers by saying that they are 
 the parents of modern criticism." And yet what 
 could be more preposterous to an independent mind 
 unswayed by a traditional superstition than the 
 monstrous inversion by which the literary successor 
 of mediaevalism has been made to appear a repre- 
 sentative of infinite and illimitable ideals, the liter- 
 ature of the idea par excellence, in contrast with the 
 narrow and soulless perfection of the Greeks, whom 
 Renan calmly declares to have been utterly destitute 
 of moral seriousness? And since many of the 
 gravest errors of the movement have succeeded in 
 perpetuating themselves in this way, piecemeal and 
 disguised, as they never could have done naked and 
 integrally, it may not be amiss to consider briefly 
 what new elements of confusion have been introduced 
 into the case by the critic who has posed it system- 
 atically and a parti pris, from the romantic point of
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 37 
 
 view, as an organic law of artistic development, and 
 whose conclusions, modified and transformed to suit 
 a later spirit, still serve as the basis of most of our 
 critical distinctions I mean Hegel. 
 
 Of all these confusions one of the most insidious, 
 to which is due in great part the current identifica- 
 tion of art and literature — or more exactly, the 
 arbitrary discrimination against every variety and 
 process of literature which fails to conform to the 
 misleading analogy of the fine arts, together with 
 all the vexatious corollaries which have been deduced 
 therefrom — lies at the very roots of Hegel's theory 
 and is assumed in his initial definition. According 
 to the terms of that definition the essential character 
 of art — of poetry and literature no less than of 
 sculpture and painting — is form. Not that Hegel 
 fails to recognize that no piece of writing offers a 
 sensible presentment in the same precise corporeal 
 manner as a statue or a painting — but his notion 
 is, just the same, that the author is bound to be as 
 concrete and plastic in the realization of the idea as 
 the sculptor, who is obliged actually to materialize 
 it under a substantial figure with definite mem- 
 bers and features set in a particular pose and ex- 
 pression. In itself language does not suffice to 
 substantiate the idea artistically any more than 
 the stone of the sculptor ; they are both but the rude 
 unfashioned material, the stocks and stones and 
 blocks out of which is constructed the tenement that 
 finally lodges the idea. It is only as they are used 
 in this way to fix the idea in a particular shape in 
 which the idea is implicated that they come to as- 
 sume a formal artistic significance. In the one case
 
 38 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the form is evoked, in the other it is represented; 
 but it is equally important in both — so much so 
 that in literature as in sculpture the absence of 
 intermediate image is conclusive evidence of want 
 of art. By definition, therefore, it becomes impos- 
 sible for literature to express its ideas immediately 
 in words — it is no such simple and popular con- 
 fusion of literary form with style into which Hegel 
 falls; on the contrary, they must be submitted to 
 a kind of preliminary projection before their final 
 reduction to language, so that when they eventually 
 reach us it is as the result of a double precipitation, 
 the one verbal, the other figurative. Such a con- 
 ception, it is interesting to notice in passing, tallies 
 with Schlegel's doctrine of poetry as a zweite Potenz 
 — imagination to the second power — the effect of 
 language being squared, as it were, with that of this 
 secondary exponent. Any writing in which the idea 
 is not masked in this particular manner, is not art; 
 in Hegelian phraseology it is only a case of the 
 absolute becoming self-conscious. 
 
 From this definition of the essential character of 
 art it results, not only that idea and image are 
 inseparable, but that the relation between them 
 affords a means for its discrimination historically 
 and absolutely. In this way arise three stages or 
 classes. In the earliest and lowest of all, which Hegel 
 calls not very happily symbolic, the idea is over- 
 powered by the matter with which it is invested. 
 The peculiarity consists, not so much in the excess 
 of bodily substance, as in the grossness of its organ- 
 ization. Either the inspiration is too dull thor- 
 oughly to fuse the materials through which it seeks
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 39 
 
 to manifest itself, or else the cast is so rude and 
 clumsy that it hardly seems to be informed by any 
 idea at all. Of course, in literature the statement 
 must be understood, not merely of the verbal com- 
 position, but of the sensuous suggestion, the spectre 
 of reality raised by the artistic use of language, 
 as in a laboured and impenetrable analogy like the 
 second part of Faust. Of such art in general archi- 
 tecture absolutely and Egyptian architecture rela- 
 tively are the types; for every art, while it repre- 
 sents, as compared with others, some one kind or 
 class exclusively, one being superior to another, has 
 yet its own historical evolution and does also in its 
 several stages illustrate all three, so conforming to 
 the cyclic or corkscrew scheme affected by the Ger- 
 man romanticists. In this hierarchy of art, then, 
 architecture occupies the lowest rank. In proportion 
 to its bulk its significance is contemptible. For its 
 size and outlay it expresses less and expresses that 
 little less clearly than any other art whatever, while 
 it is in Egyptian architecture that this sense of 
 obstruction and obscurity is at its strongest. Some- 
 thing it does seem to suggest — some presentiment 
 of dark and riddling fatality, but suffocating under 
 an incubus of meaningless masonry. In such a case, 
 indeed, it is impossible to speak of expression in 
 any proper meaning of the word. The production is 
 not really expressive at all ; it acts at best as a kind 
 of sign, a hieroglyph, or in Hegel's words, a symbol 
 of the idea. And as there is an almost ludicrous 
 incongruity between the sign and what it signifies, 
 like a child's drawing of reality, the effect of such 
 an art is inevitably grotesque.
 
 40 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 The second or classical order or degree of art 
 arises when the idea and the form are in some sort 
 of equilibrium. There must be a perfectly clear 
 conception and a thoroughly adequate realization so 
 that neither the physical nor the spiritual is in 
 excess of the other. On the one hand, such art 
 does not attempt to express more than its materials 
 are capable of rendering; and on the other hand, 
 these materials are thoroughly informed and ani- 
 mated by the thought. Sculpture is the generic 
 example, with its substantial but shapely propor- 
 tions, its limited but sufficient import. In music, 
 in painting, even in literature there is felt to be a 
 want of firmness and solidity, a deficiency of body, 
 in the media of expression. But in sculpture, and 
 more specifically in Greek sculpture, which Hegel 
 looks upon as the formal perfection at once of the 
 genre and of art as a whole, the idea itself is just 
 suited to corporeal representation; while the stone, 
 though saturated with the idea, is still capable of 
 holding it in suspension like a clear transparent 
 solution. Evidently art like this, illustrated rela- 
 tively for literature by Greek tragedy, which critics 
 still persist absurdly enough in comparing with a 
 frieze or a bas-relief, supposes a double adaptation, 
 not only of image to idea, but also of idea to image. 
 It is the result of a felicitous compromise between 
 spirit and matter — an inglorious concession, Hegel 
 seems to think, on the part of the former. Spirit- 
 ualize the conception never so little and the marble 
 is no longer able to do it justice. The harmony of 
 the statue is impaired; you have one of those gnarled 
 and gristly colossi of Michelangelo's, part seraph,
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 41 
 
 part prize-fighter, agonizing tempestuously in a par- 
 oxysm of thwarted aspiration. Or the medium 
 changes; your Apollo becomes a cramped ascetic 
 languishing ineffectually on a strip of painted can- 
 vas. In any case, the integrity of the association 
 is destroyed; the soul has hopelessly outgrown 
 its physical habitation ; and the result is a new man- 
 ner or development of art, the romantic, which 
 Hegel designates as distinctively supreme and 
 modern. 
 
 It is not only that modern life is fuller and more 
 varied than was ancient, it is also more profound 
 and mysterious. On the one hand, the mere spec- 
 tacle and outward show of things, which constitutes 
 the subject of artistic representation, is vaster and 
 more bewildering than ever; on the other hand, the 
 problems it suggests, which supply the artistic theme 
 or motif, are infinitely more baffling and inscrutable. 
 We are no longer concerned exclusively with the 
 present visible world of the ancients; we have be- 
 come rummagers of the past, antiquitatis perscru- 
 tatores, and peepers upon the future. To our prop- 
 erly human cares and anxieties we have added the 
 world to come, the life everlasting. Small wonder 
 that our minds have grown over-curious, refined, 
 and subtle; that our spirits are perturbed and 
 troubled. Under these circumstances, the artist 
 finds himself in the presence of an accumulation 
 of experience, emotion, conjecture, and speculation 
 so prodigious that it is impossible for him to reduce 
 it to any definite and palpable form of being. Since 
 he can apprehend it himself only darkly and fur- 
 tively, as it were by indirect vision, so he can com-
 
 42 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 municate it only by way of suggestion or similitude. 
 Hence the need of a more ethereal, a less earthly 
 medium, like painting or music, or a more tenuous 
 genre, like lyric poetry, for the characteristic mani- 
 festations of romantic art. 
 
 Such is, in outline, Hegel's classification and phil- 
 osphy of art; or more narrowly and relevantly, such 
 is his contribution to the definition of classic and 
 romantic. Nor is it difficult to see, even from this 
 hasty sketch, why the Aesthetics should have made 
 its critical fortune. At its touch matters diverse and 
 disparate seem to draw together and coalesce 
 and take on meaning as though by enchant- 
 ment; the illusion of method is complete. In this 
 wise it appears to account for the sense of ease and 
 satisfaction and finality in Greek art; for the feeling 
 of lack, the longing and nostalgia of modern art — 
 and to do so in the most agreeable and flattering 
 manner by ascribing the perfection of the former to 
 a mere nicety of technical adaptation while condon- 
 ing the very incapacity of the latter as a trifling 
 physical infirmity significant only of excessive soul- 
 fulness. In such manner, it takes advantage of an 
 easy confusion between evolution and development, 
 and assumes the latest of an historical series for 
 the greatest, regardless of the fact that decadence is 
 as much a term of the vital series as gestation. How 
 seriously such an oversight has affected Hegel's 
 general conclusions I am not prepared to say. To 
 criticize his theory as a whole would not only lead 
 me too far afield, it would be beyond my powers. 
 I would notice only in the application to literature 
 one or two errors which still continue for all their
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 43 
 
 gravity to perpetuate themselves in contemporary 
 criticism. 
 
 In the first place, Hegel assumes that art and lit- 
 erature have to do with the same sort of ideas. He 
 takes it for granted that the idea of a picture, a 
 sonata, and a book are all of a single denomination. 
 But not only is such an assumption absurd, it also 
 introduces into literature an arbitrary and artificial 
 distinction by confusing its manner or method too 
 with that of art. Not only is it evident on the face 
 of it that neither a painting nor a sonata expresses 
 the same order of ideas as a book, but it is evident 
 that neither expresses its proper idea in the same 
 manner — if indeed a painting or a sonata can be 
 said to express an idea at all. To believe otherwise 
 is to leave one kind of literature out of account al- 
 together. On such a supposition only that kind of 
 writing in which the idea is disguised in concrete 
 circumstance in such a way as to lose resemblance 
 to itself and become fixed in the mind under some 
 particular physical aspect, belongs to art. All writ- 
 ing, on the contrary, which attempts to give an 
 account of its ideas without the assistance of such 
 an intermediary, is not art; it is the resolution of 
 art. To speak exactly, then, literature, in as far as 
 it is art, would exist in the first instance, not for the 
 expression of ideas at all, but for the evocation of 
 images. Such a hard and fast distinction drawn 
 straight through the body of literature I for one can 
 not admit. I can not group the drama, the epic, 
 the novel on one side of such an imaginary line; 
 and the essay, criticism, history, oratory, it may be, 
 on the other. Without further reason I can not
 
 44 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 applaud Thackeray when he narrates and condemn 
 him when he reflects. I can not reserve my admira- 
 tion solely for the figure and my contempt for the 
 mot propre. It would be better to withdraw litera- 
 ture from under the wing of art altogether — nor is 
 the name of such favourable literary augury these 
 days that any serious-minded critic should stickle 
 for it — for literature is all of a piece and indivisible 
 by virtue of the exact identity of its materials and 
 its intention. 
 
 And here again, though it amounts to much the 
 same thing in the end, Hegel fails to make a second 
 vital distinction. The materials of the artist — the 
 stone of the sculptor, the colours of the painter, the 
 notes of the musician — are not naturally suitable 
 for the communication of ideas. In themselves they 
 are not properly expressive. They serve only as the 
 groundwork of a physical contrivance in which some 
 sort of idea is at best implicit and which serves to 
 suggest the idea vaguely and uncertainly — or rather, 
 certain of its circumstantial characteristics. It is 
 almost as though the idea were accidental, or at least 
 incidental, in art — so much so that many modern 
 artists, notably writers so styled like Gautier and 
 Maupassant, have denied its existence altogether. 
 
 But the function of language, on the contrary, 
 is precisely the immediate identification and defini- 
 tion of ideas. Its significance resides solely in ex- 
 pression. Hence the curious transfer whereby the 
 term has come to mean in literature, not the purport 
 or sense of a certain detail of execution as in the 
 fine arts, but the phrase itself. As a result, litera- 
 ture is explicit by its very constitution. To be in
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 45 
 
 character it is bound to be intellectual. When it 
 ceases to be so, it becomes inferior or worthless. 
 Even emotion must be rationalized if it is to agree 
 with the structure of language. In short, literature 
 is quite another thing than art, not only in method 
 but in spirit. It does not live, as painting and 
 sculpture do, in the world of physical forms at all, 
 but incorporeally and in the idea. And conse- 
 quently, it is only by a kind of license that it can be 
 said to exist, as is so often glibly repeated, for the 
 creation of the beautiful. Since it is deprived of 
 anything like substantial figure or material contour, 
 the epithet beautiful has no exact and literal mean- 
 ing when applied to it. In a strict use of terms an 
 idea is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is true or false. 
 Or if it is beautiful in any sense, it is so only in an 
 applied and secondary one by the fineness of its 
 truth. While as for poetry, though I hope I appre- 
 ciate its sensuous charms as much as any man, yet 
 they are at best but ancillary to the thought and 
 even in themselves, again, are beautiful, not in a 
 precise definition, but merely figuratively and by 
 way of a trope. Such is the mischief that results 
 from the attempt to convert an innocent manner of 
 speaking into a hard and fast formula that many 
 have unthinkingly accepted as a scientific specifica- 
 tion what has but an approximate and descriptive 
 value, to the detriment of the whole conception and 
 theory of poetry. The manner of literature, like 
 its matter, is proper to itself; it has attractions of 
 its own comparable after a fashion with those of 
 music, with whose general movement and develop- 
 ment it corresponds much more closely than with
 
 46 Romance and Tragedy- 
 
 painting or sculpture, but by no means identical with 
 them even in that limited sense which makes per- 
 fection of style an art or beauty, as well as an end, 
 in itself. 
 
 As a matter of fact, what Hegel has done, is virtu- 
 ally to raise a prejudice against all literature which 
 is expressive rather than suggestive — that is to say, 
 which is not romantic. Since art is incapable of 
 conveying an idea except indirectly and by means 
 of an image, it is a natural inference that a perfectly 
 clear and explicit literature, inasmuch as it is inartis- 
 tic, is in some degree inferior. And this impression 
 is deepened by a recognition of the following corol- 
 laries of the theory. 
 
 Since romantic art is characterized by a disparity 
 between conception and expression, it must approach 
 in effect the first and most primitive manner of art, 
 the symbolic. To be sure, Hegel implies that the 
 one is over-spiritualized, while the other is under- 
 spiritualized. But his classification is based entirely 
 upon the relation of form to idea; and both cases 
 are marked equally by a disproportion between the 
 two. To all intents and purposes, the result is the 
 same; both are imperfect art. And since in the one 
 case as in the other the realization is hardly more 
 than a sign of the idea, a hierogylph more or less 
 arbitrary and inadequate, a mere intimation rather 
 than an indication, romantic art is essentially as 
 symbolic as its predecessor. Such a consequence, 
 indeed, Schleiermacher makes no bones about ac- 
 cepting, though with a slight distinction — - it is 
 hardly a difference — in defining romantic art as 
 allegorical — a definition which Heine adopts and
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 47 
 
 elaborates, after his own fashion, in his Romantische 
 Schule, though his approval has by no means the 
 force of a concession. And finally, in consequence 
 of the discrepancy between the idea and its expres- 
 sion there arises in both instances the same sense of 
 almost ludicrous incongruity, the " grotesque," 
 which Hegel himself remarked in " symbolic " art 
 and which Hugo in his preface to Cromwell recog- 
 nized as a note of romantic art too — a declaration 
 which Schlegel had in a manner anticipated with 
 his " transcendental irony." Hence, thanks to a 
 question-begging definition, the highest manifesta- 
 tion of literature, by force of being romantic, 
 becomes identified with a kind of writing originally 
 symbolic or allegorical in character, in which the 
 idea tends to shrink farther and farther behind the 
 material incident and circumstance with which it is 
 at first incorporated, until it virtually disappears 
 altogether. 
 
 From these considerations it would seem as though 
 Hegel must have divined the character of romanti- 
 cism very imperfectly — at least in its relation to 
 literature. In particular, he has failed to detect the 
 circumstance — perhaps he was too unfavourably 
 situated to do so both from the literary and the 
 historical point of view — that this romanticism 
 which he has celebrated as a literature of boundless 
 aspiration, is characterized in principle by an almost 
 slavish subservience to sense. And yet his system 
 logically contains the whole formula of I'art pour 
 Vart and of " naturalism." The insistence upon the 
 value of form, upon the sensuous garniture of the 
 idea, is sufficient to motive the former movement;
 
 48 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 while the indifference to clearness of expression in 
 comparison with the importance he attaches to con- 
 crete and objective realization — or rather, material- 
 ization — seems to make it inevitable that what was 
 at first a mere medium or vehicle for the transmis- 
 sion of thought, should gradually lose its ulterior sig- 
 nificance, like a painted window with the light gone 
 out of it, and become an end in itself, like any other 
 opaque and impervious surface. So it is pertinent 
 to observe that the French " neo-romanticists " — 
 Gautier, Flaubert, the Goncourts — though but sec- 
 taries and representative only of a local and limited 
 romanticism, were virtually realists — however they 
 might resent the imputation — at the same time 
 that they professed to be " artists " exclusively and 
 preoccupied solely with " form." From them to 
 the " naturalists " was but half a step, as is indi- 
 cated by their intimacy and sympathy with Zola, 
 who at once riotously impressionistic and meticu- 
 lously documentary seems to unite the two extremes 
 of the movement in his own person. In short, it is 
 towards actuality that the current of romanticism, 
 in its main waters as in its several branches, steadily 
 sets. In principle, the romanticists have always 
 found their affair, not exactly in representing things 
 as they are, but in reproducing the sense of headi- 
 ness and intoxication, the giddiness and Ransch with 
 which the excitable spirit of the poet is affected in 
 the immediate presence of life — rather than in 
 fathoming its significance and rationalizing its ap- 
 parent inconsequences. Or more accurately, they 
 have pretended to find this significance in the sensa- 
 tions proper to existence. Hence the characteristic
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 49 
 
 suggestiveness, the romantic " wonder," generated 
 by the imitation of nature and explicable by the ab- 
 sence of definite intellectual content, as a shadowy 
 corner looks the more mysterious the emptier it is. 
 This connection between romanticism and what 
 we are accustomed to call by another name and to 
 think of erroneously as something quite different, is 
 expressed by the Spanish critic and scholar, Menen- 
 dez y Pelayo, himself a romanticist by the fatal im- 
 pulsion of blood and nationality, in so clear and final 
 a fashion that it would be mere pedantry not to 
 quote him literatim: 
 
 " At the bottom of every first-rate work of art there is, 
 in our opinion, a multitude of ideas which have never 
 perhaps crossed the mind of the poet in their abstract 
 and general expression, but which actually underlie the 
 concrete and palpable forms of his work, as they underlie 
 life itself, of which every dramatic work worthy of the 
 name is an idealized transcript. And the richer and more 
 complete the reality reflected in the work of art, so much 
 the greater is the number of ideas which, thanks to it, are 
 revealed and made manifest to the eyes of the readers." 
 
 Precisely. In spite of the deceptive solidity of its 
 pretensions naturalism so-called is only a variant of 
 romanticism — romanticism on all fours, if you like, 
 but still romanticism. Minor differences aside, they 
 concur essentially in asserting the substantial iden- 
 tity of literature and life. To the one as to the other 
 the cardinal virtue of art is to lend itself, like nature, 
 to an unlimited variety of interpretations in pre- 
 senting a surface which produces virtually the same 
 order of sensations and involves the same order of
 
 50 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 ideas. The rest is merely a matter of relative em- 
 phasis. If the interpretation seems transcendental 
 to the romanticist and scientific to the naturalist, it 
 does so because the significance is indefinite, as a 
 cloud may resemble anything as long as its figure 
 remains undefined. 
 
 Candidly, it can hardly be said that Hegel himself 
 blinks this kinship altogether, whatever derivative 
 criticism may do; he divines it, to be sure, but very 
 imperfectly. " In the representation of sensible 
 forms," he observes, " art is no longer afraid to take 
 to her bosom reality with all its imperfections. 
 Beauty has ceased to be indispensable; the ugly 
 has come to occupy a prominent place in her cre- 
 ations." But though this formula seems, after the 
 event, to provide for the contingency, it is doubtful 
 whether he himself would have been prepared at 
 the time to open his arms to such a portentous ap- 
 parition as Zola ; for the point is, he fails to conceive 
 of romanticism in any but its more local and secular 
 manifestations. To its broader aspect as a charac- 
 teristic product of modernism, the summation of a 
 series in which " naturalism " is but a single 
 term, he is pretty well blinded. If anything, he 
 appears to regard the research of actuality as a 
 symptom of romantic decline and is disposed to ter- 
 minate the movement, whose very being is the cult 
 of sensation, at the moment when it begins to come 
 of age and declare itself for what it is. 
 
 On the whole, then, temerarious as it may seem 
 to say so, the greatest objection to which Hegel's 
 conclusions — or rather, the criticism which derives 
 from them is liable from the point of view of liter-
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 51 
 
 ature, is superficiality. And indeed, in treating lit- 
 erature substantially as an affair of form on the 
 same footing with the arts he himself is not guiltless 
 of confounding the essential with the incidental. In 
 such arts as painting and sculpture it is hardly going 
 too far to say that it is the form which solicits the 
 idea; in literature, on the contrary, it is the idea 
 which appropriates the form. In art, that is to say, 
 the idea is accessory — and even then it is mainly an 
 idea about form and material; while in literature it 
 is paramount and principal, the form merely receives 
 and contains it. Literature, then, as far as it is true 
 to itself and its own character, is not so much con- 
 cerned to image life as to commemorate some idea 
 about it — or in other words to interpret it. Hence 
 any satisfactory classification of the subject must 
 proceed, not from form or yet from the relation 
 between form and idea, but solely from the ideas 
 which alone give significance to its interpretations. 
 Now, as a matter of fact, the interpretations of 
 classic and romantic literature seem in a broad 
 and general way to be informed by two distinct ideas 
 or conceptions of life. To the former life is at 
 bottom an illustration of moral principles, whose 
 main interest is human and rational. To the latter, 
 as far as it illustrates anything at all, its interest is 
 " natural " and " scientific "; it is an illustration of 
 physical law. From the literary point of view life 
 has always presented itself to the romanticist as 
 a subject of powerful if impermanent sensations, a 
 spectacle of inexhaustible variety and brilliancy, 
 capable of an indefinite amount of emotional stimu- 
 lation. It is so to Zola and Tolstoi as truly as to
 
 52 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Victor Hugo and Shakespeare. As far as their re- 
 ports yield any clear and consistent idea of it, they 
 yield only such an idea as is proper to actuality itself 
 — an idea of " natural " or mechanical congruity. 
 In other words, while the classicist found his motive 
 of literary order in the integrity of the human spirit, 
 the modern seeks for his in the uniformity of nature. 
 To Sophocles, for instance, the course of human 
 events would seem to have been regulated exclu- 
 sively in accordance with some abstract principle of 
 absolute justice, which provided automatically for 
 the correction or suppression of the offender in pro- 
 portion to the gravity and danger of his guilt. An 
 offence once committed,, it was as impossible for the 
 offender to evade the moral responsibility by plead- 
 ing the purity of his intentions as to escape the 
 physical consequences; indeed, they were one and 
 the same. The act itself was sufficient to imperil the 
 moral order, as a civil crime is now felt to imperil 
 our social order; and it was visited accordingly upon 
 the transgressor, not with the discretion of a human 
 arrest but with the same relentlessness and impassi- 
 bility as what we speak of loosely nowadays as an 
 infringement of " natural " law. Indeed, Sophocles' 
 providence or fate or whatever it may be called, ap- 
 pears in its workings singularly like our " nature " 
 save that it is thoroughly and inherently moral and 
 relevant, for to such a conception there was nat- 
 urally no accident. Character as such had no more 
 to do with the one law than it has to do with the 
 other; the child who holds his hand to the fire is 
 sacrificed as inevitably as Antigone, no matter how 
 amiable his disposition. Man was all of a piece;
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 53 
 
 what he was and did, was as much a part of him 
 as what he purposed. Happiness was, therefore, a 
 moral issue; success, an evidence as a result of 
 virtue. 
 
 Naturally such a position is no longer tenable. 
 With the modern notion of physical causation conse- 
 quences have become in themselves morally irrele- 
 vant. Guilt or innocence is but an imputation. 
 What happens is merely a term in a mechanical 
 series and without moral significance of any kind. 
 Let the statue of Mitys fall upon the murderer's 
 head as it may, it will never quicken our conscience 
 a jot. When the religious man like Nicias goes to 
 the wall, we conclude only that he has failed to 
 hit things off somehow and we call him superstitious 
 for his pains; his piety is beside the mark. Such 
 a philosophy, however, if logically enforced, as it 
 is in science, is felt to be fantastically superficial; 
 it fails to satisfy the heart, it is dramatically im- 
 possible. In spite of such prepossessing names as 
 " utilitarianism " and " Nietzscheism," the effort to 
 dissolve humanity in nature has had but a partial 
 success as yet; and where it has most succeeded, 
 literature has most suffered. On the whole, the seri- 
 ous drama has attempted to save the moral issue by 
 a kind of compromise in transferring human respon- 
 sibility from act to intention. Hence the tragedy 
 of character. But even in this view happiness is 
 nothing more than a clever adjustment to " environ- 
 ment " and illustrates nothing one way or another 
 — except Darwinism. The unscrupulous may suc- 
 ceed; there is no power interested in frustrating 
 them — indeed, they are more likely to do so than
 
 54 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 not, they are the least handicapped. And so, as a 
 matter of fact, they do in Shakespeare's historical 
 plays, where he was unable to tamper with his 
 materials. On the other hand, the scrupulous may 
 go to the ground, as in a drama of the general 
 type of Hamlet. From this dilemma, again, tragedy 
 tries to extricate itself with greater and greater diffi- 
 culty. We still have moral prejudices and we oc- 
 casionally withdraw our situation from the domain 
 of nature to that of conscience. We like to show 
 occasionally that the villainous arithmetician may 
 bungle his calculations like Iago. Or after all, like 
 Claudius, he may not be so prosperous as he looks. 
 But then, unless we do violence to our logic of 
 nature — as Shakespeare is not always averse to 
 doing when he can and as there is always great 
 temptation to do — such a man's unhappiness 
 must be subjective and so more or less unfit for 
 dramatic exhibition. And so from all these com- 
 promises and concessions there results a kind of 
 fundamental inconsistency and insincerity about our 
 serious romantic drama — it is not tragedy at all, 
 but a nondescript; for tragedy is impossible without 
 an unflinching moral vision. The sole relief is to 
 save our sympathy for the virtuous but unhandy 
 hero and his cause and to cover his adversary with 
 contumely. The resolution is purely human, it is 
 a kind of argumentum ad hominem; there is no 
 vestige of divinity about it. 
 
 But such speculations are premature. They only 
 illustrate in the persistent genre of drama the two 
 different conceptions of life and its significance 
 which determine romantic and classic literature.
 
 The Terms Classic and Romantic 55 
 
 That this difference of idea may have occasional 
 differences of form in the only sense in which the 
 word has any meaning for literature — that is, of 
 style and structure — I am far from denying. But 
 the latter sort of difference is merely a secondary 
 characteristic. 
 
 The principal and primary matter is the difference 
 of view. And in the determination of this essential 
 difference modern criticism, riddled as it is with the 
 misconceptions and misrepresentations of romanti- 
 cism, gives us little assistance. And yet with this 
 uncertainty fastened upon it, without a clear under- 
 standing of the character of the fundamental inter- 
 pretations which literature undertakes, how shall 
 criticism hope to arrive at any final conclusion on 
 any subject? Indeed, this is the reason that all our 
 criticism is so uncertain, groping, and tentative the 
 moment it abandons pure description and under- 
 takes to deal with anything larger than an isolated 
 phenomenon, a mere biographical or philological de- 
 tail; it lacks the elementary generalization, the basis 
 of classification. 
 
 For these reasons I can not help thinking that one 
 of the first requisites for a sound criticism in the 
 future is a general rectification of values founded 
 upon an examination of the ideas at the bottom of 
 Greek and modern literature — not a squabble over 
 classicism and romanticism in the narrower and 
 sectarian sense of the words, but a comparison of 
 the two dispositions of spirit illustrated by the two 
 orders of literature as a whole. In a single breath, 
 what we need is a fundamental literary criticism 
 which shall differ from philology and history in
 
 56 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 being a criticism of principles and from aesthetics 
 in devoting itself to the peculiarities of literature 
 as distinct from the fine arts — that is to say, as a 
 medium of ideas. And in this task it seems as 
 though comparative literature might find its most 
 useful occupation at the present time. I can not 
 believe that it is by a confrontation of verbal or 
 conceptual borrowings, or by a juxtaposition of hap- 
 hazard parallelisms, much less by a nosing of recon- 
 dite analogies through a maze of barren dialects in 
 which a flower of poetry never bloomed, that com- 
 parative literature is going to quicken our gratitude 
 or justify its high pretensions. But rather, it is by 
 the definition of certain universal ideas and prin- 
 ciples which are appreciable only by contrast, much 
 as our sensation is itself a matter of variety. And 
 not only is the task I have ventured to propose of 
 such a sort — not only is it in itself a worthy and 
 desirable work — but it is also one well worthy of 
 the breadth, the learning, and the disinterestedness 
 to which comparative literature lays claim. 
 
 Such a task is hardly to be accomplished or even 
 undertaken by a single writer or all at once. But 
 it may be performed little by little and by many 
 hands. Every critic who attempts, however small 
 his scope, to exhibit the vital connection between 
 literature and life, who eschews mere formal and 
 verbal eristic to elicit his author's ideas, who keeps 
 a sure hold on reality and illustrates his subjects by 
 his experience, who judges not by caprice or con- 
 vention but by principle — such a critic is contri- 
 buting his share to the making of such a criticism.
 
 GERMAN ROMANTICISM 
 
 Welch ein Unfug! Welch Geschrei! 
 
 FAUST 
 
 THE German romantic movement was the result 
 of defective culture, of bodily and mental de- 
 rangement, of spiritual and nervous disorder. It 
 is a work of degeneration, deformation, and disease. 
 And it bears on its front the stigmata of its in- 
 firmities — absurdity, folly, inanity, and confusion. 
 There is Hardenberg, the pattern of the school, 
 who falls in love with a chit of thirteen and at her 
 death a year or so later dedicates himself to the 
 grave, an unblemished sacrifice of love, unblighted 
 by sickness, violence, or sorrow, the cheerful victim 
 of his own regret. In the meanwhile he begins a 
 new era and dates his note-books from the epoch 
 of her decease. By the end of the following twelve- 
 month, however, he has sufficiently vaporized his 
 emotions in various scribblings to choose another 
 bride and is reduced to " faking " metaphysical non- 
 sense to pass off an infidelity which would never 
 have been cast up against him but for his extrav- 
 agant protestations. Sophie and Julie are two, such 
 is his magic arithmetic, only in the land of phenom- 
 ena; in the land of fulfillment, where all differences 
 are reconciled, they are but one. There again is 
 Friedrich Schlegel, grubber of ideas for the whole 
 party, proclaiming in sublime paradox that formless- 
 
 57
 
 58 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 ness is the highest form of art; the fragment, the 
 consummate genre of literature; the dissolution of 
 poetic illusion, the signet of poetic genius. Prophet 
 of transcendental buffoonery and irony, of Freiheit 
 and Willkur, he has ended his days in the service 
 of the two narrowest Autoritdtsprincipien that ever 
 were, Austrian imperialism and Roman Catholicism. 
 There is Tieck too, after an education little better 
 than an emotional and intellectual debauch, writing 
 dramas backwards and demonstrating the identity 
 of poetry and music by " transposing " notes into 
 words : 
 
 " Die Far be klingt, die Form ertont." 
 
 There is Schleiermacher, the priest, the Geist- 
 licher preaching free love and the " emancipation 
 of woman," making himself, in Walzel's words, " the 
 forerunner of the modern French novel," the gospel 
 of lubricity and license. And finally there are poor 
 Holderlin and Wackenroder, the one crack-brained 
 at thirty or thereabouts, the other fretted out at 
 twenty-five between his duty and his inclinations. 
 Nor are their friends and lovers much better. On 
 the whole they are pretty much of a piece with Doro- 
 thea Veit, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who 
 deserts her husband and two children to run after 
 Friedrich Schlegel, and Caroline Michaelis — Dame 
 Lucifer, Schiller called her — Bohmer's widow, Gal- 
 lic agitator, inmate of a German prison, mother of 
 a nameless child, who accepts Friedrich's brother 
 Wilhelm, as a pis aller and under his nose carries 
 on a liaison with Schelling, for whom she finally 
 leaves her husand.
 
 German Romanticism 59 
 
 But enough of personalities. The thoroughly sig- 
 nificant thing about German romanticism as a lit- 
 terary phenomenon is its sterility. It has almost 
 no works, literally next to nothing to show for itself 
 in the way of literature. A little vapid verse, two 
 or three staggering dramas, a few rickety Mdrchen 
 and twaddling rhapsodies, several dilapidated novels, 
 or rather romances, to sustain the claims of a school 
 that pretended to derive from the Roman — this is 
 just about all its literary capital, the greater part 
 of it unreadable, inexpressibly childish, silly, and 
 dull. In itself it were all equally harmless, though 
 for different reasons, because all equally ineffectual. 
 If there is something almost disarming about the 
 naivete which could seriously busy itself with a per- 
 formance like Heinrich von Ojterdingen, the pre- 
 posterous crudity and flatulence of a Sternbald is no 
 less disabling. Both were alike negligible, had it not 
 been for the impudence of their exploiters. Indeed, 
 as a general thing the illustrators of the movement 
 were not in the first instance responsible; they were 
 merely " let in " for it. In its inception the school 
 consisted virtually of a pair of doctrinaires and 
 theorists — Wilhelm Schlegel, dilettante and ec- 
 lectic, and his brother, Friedrich, pedant and mau- 
 vais tetc — who attempted to create a criticism a 
 priori and who, impotent to illustrate it themselves, 
 were forced to have recourse to what they were able 
 to pick up elsewhere. After a fashion it resembled 
 those institutions which are universities in name but
 
 60 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 in fact are nothing but examining boards. It criti- 
 cized the productions of others, and if pleased there- 
 with, graduated them romantic. It lived on foreign 
 conquest and annexation, and made capital of the 
 fruit of other men's labours. In such wise it cannily 
 took possession of Tieck, who was at bottom an 
 independent man of letters, a free lance, even a 
 journalist in the sense that with him literature was 
 before all a business and a livelihood. In a word 
 Tieck was too much of a Dryden to be a romanticist 
 by vocation. The significant thing about him is that 
 he outgrew his romanticism, which in his case was 
 only a malady of adolescence, a distemper or kind 
 of green sickness. It was merely one of his manners 
 and no more permanent or final than that which 
 marked his period of " enlightenment." 
 
 In particular, however, romanticism found its 
 most advantageous affair in the inadvertencies and 
 indiscretions of acknowledged genius. So it laid 
 hands upon certain work of Schiller's and Goethe's, 
 and insisted upon making them romantic leaders in 
 spite of their protests. To be sure, Goethe was in 
 some sense romantic and not wholly irresponsible 
 for many of the positions his name was used to 
 cover. But the capital fact of his life, after all, was 
 his conversion from romanticism, even after his own 
 kind, which was at worst of quite another complex- 
 ion than that of the School's. What importance he 
 himself attached to this change of colours, is shown 
 by the circumstance that he is constantly preoccu- 
 pied with it during the latter part of his life — end- 
 lessly affirming, explaining, justifying, and comment- 
 ing it. Unfortunately, however, for a just perception
 
 German Romanticism 61 
 
 of the facts it is the romantic Goethe with whom we 
 are better acquainted, partly on account of the 
 currency which he himself has given his earlier years 
 in Dichtung und Wahrheit and partly on account of 
 the assiduity with which the romanticists have con- 
 tinued painting his portrait after their own likeness. 
 But for all the seduction of his youth and the apothe- 
 osis it has received, the significance of his manhood, 
 of his intellectual being, should not be overlooked 
 — and that was irreconcilably at odds with the ro- 
 mantic error. 
 
 And yet it must be acknowleded in the same 
 breath that whatever his principles, Goethe was al- 
 ways inclined to coquette with romanticism more 
 than was good for him. Personally I fail to see 
 much choice, as literature, between the second part 
 of Faust and Tieck's Prinz Zerbino. As a system 
 of philosophy, metaphysics, or Symbolik the former 
 may be vastly superior; that is a question to be de- 
 cided by those who understand it. But at all events 
 it was by no means difficult for the romanticists to 
 find in him excuse or precedent for some of their 
 worst follies. So it was in particular with the gi- 
 gantic egotism which underlay their pretensions to 
 artistic vocation. There is something almost bete 
 in the complacency and open-mouthed stupefaction 
 with which Goethe — and even Schiller, who had 
 less reason for it — contemplate their own produc- 
 tions, as though they were some great and inevitable 
 work of nature, to say nothing of the exaggerated 
 respect which they have for their own occupation. 
 And while perhaps the frequent fatuity of the roman- 
 ticists was less innocent as it was less excusable,
 
 62 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 they might have pointed to this common trait among 
 others as a plausible evidence of kinship. 
 
 Nevertheless, the lesson to be drawn from the 
 careers of Goethe and Tieck as a whole is perfectly 
 obvious. The notions of the Romantic School are, 
 in the most favourable interpretation, those of youth 
 and immaturity; it is impossible for any sane man 
 to grow old, not to say ripe, in them. Their very 
 begetters abandoned them in later life — or rather, 
 the other way about, their ideas abandoned them, 
 and they went out one after another like draughty 
 candles. Even the two Schlegels became, the one a 
 functionary of authority and tradition, the other a 
 literary cicisbeo or factotum. In short, there is 
 about romanticism nothing permanent or achieved. 
 It is not a state of attainment in which it is possible 
 to rest content, as Goethe rested in his classicism. It 
 is not even a stage of development; it is a mood, an 
 aberration of spirit, to which youth, together with 
 periods of dissolution and transition, is particularly 
 liable. 
 
 No wonder, then, that the existence of German 
 romanticism was parasitic; it lacked the constitution 
 to live independently and relied upon other sources 
 for its sustenance and support. Hence in part its 
 mischievousness. It deranged the intellectual econ- 
 omy and impaired the moral health of the whole 
 age and its posterity by disturbing the natural cir- 
 culation of ideas and stimulating a set of abnormal 
 and artificial appetites and reactions. The ideas 
 which it appropriated, the work which it approved, 
 were seldom their authors' best or sanest. To be 
 sure, there was at the time little enough that was
 
 German Romanticism 63 
 
 excellent to choose from; still of what there was, 
 it failed to take the best. Or if by any chance it 
 did, the reasons for its choice, as well as the use it 
 made of its selections, were anything but judicious. 
 Naturally, its acquisitions were exceptional and acci- 
 dental when considered with reference to the entire 
 work of the author from whom they were extracted; 
 and since they formed no ensemble of themselves, 
 they were frequently inconsistent and incongruous 
 one with another. In this way arose endless difficul- 
 ties — multiplied explanations, reconciliations, com- 
 promises, adjustments, extenuations — and in gen- 
 eral an impression of confusion and inconsequence 
 about the whole ingeniously tessellated fabric. This 
 is the explanation too of that inextricable mixture of 
 truth and falsehood in the romantic doctrine by 
 which so much that is erroneous has succeeded in 
 passing current in the past until our criticism and 
 appreciation are honeycombed with it and by which 
 the wariest critic is liable to be disconcerted still. 
 
 Upon this confusion it was inevitable that the 
 intellectual sterility peculiar to the movement should 
 react disastrously. As a matter of fact, the two 
 characters are hardly separable, and it would be 
 difficult to say whether the romantic confusion is 
 a result of literary impotence or vice versa. It is 
 merely a case of action and reaction. Inasmuch as 
 its promoters had few ideas of their own, they were 
 thriftily disposed to make these ideas go as far as 
 possible by applying them' to all sorts of subjects 
 indiscriminately. So Friedrich Schlegel transferred 
 to current criticism the principles he had originally 
 derived from the study of Greek. He judges Wil-
 
 64 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 helm Meister by the same criteria as the Iliad and 
 the Odyssey and arrives, as might be expected, at 
 an insanely jumbled estimate of both. Nor did the 
 school, under his able tuition and that of his brother, 
 proceed otherwise with such general subjects as 
 art, nature, religion, and philosophy, as though to 
 justify Schleiermacher's saying, " Es gehbrt zu dem 
 sick noch immer weiter bildenden Gegensatz der 
 neuen Zeit gegen die alte, dass nirgend mehr einer 
 eines ist, sondern jeder dies." So little sense had 
 they of the just measure that they seldom touched 
 an idea without spraining it. They broke up wholes 
 into parts and erected parts into wholes. They 
 isolated single factors and treated them as complete 
 in themselves. They mistook means for ends and 
 ends for means. They added and subtracted unlike 
 denominations to make a desired product. They 
 slurred distinctions and ignored resemblances. They 
 invented such hybrids as the " religion of art " and 
 the " religion of nature," terms which they took lit- 
 erally, not metaphorically. " Any man is a priest," 
 says Schleiermacher, " who under a form original 
 and complete has developed in himself, to the point 
 of virtuosity, the faculty of feeling in any mode of 
 representation." With Schelling they turned po- 
 etry into philosophy and with Novalis they turned 
 religion into poetry. For the latter, indeed, the 
 gospels derive their authority chiefly from the fact 
 that they have to do with the dissolution of a spell 
 (Verzauberung) and hence resemble a Marchen or 
 fairy tale, the favourite romantic genre. In a word, 
 confusion — chaos they themselves define as the ro- 
 mantic element — is, with futility, the constant char-
 
 German Romanticism 65 
 
 acter of the movement, and our present universal 
 deformation of ideas is but an heirloom of the School. 
 Capital, in particular, for its critical temper is 
 the crass eclecticism with which it sought to run 
 the arts together, into a kind of indiscriminate med- 
 ley, without regard for their natural differences of 
 aim, effect, material, and method. With the phe- 
 nomenon itself we are only too well acquainted now- 
 adays, when our critics are still discoursing as though 
 the Laokoon had never been written, while our poets 
 are industriously creating pastels in prose and sym- 
 phonies in verse, to say nothing of the painter's 
 marvels in tone and the musician's miracles of colour. 
 But appalling as it is to observe how quickly a dis- 
 tinction once achieved may be totally obliterated, 
 it is not we in this case who are the first offenders. 
 Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, and " many more 
 whose names on earth are dark " — they are all 
 with one accord for the promiscuity of art. " Hence 
 it is desirable to bring the arts together again and 
 to seek transitions from one to the others. In this 
 wise statues may rouse into paintings, paintings 
 become poems, poems music, and who knows what 
 noble church music will mount once more like a 
 temple into the air! " So the elder Schlegel; and 
 to much the same effect Novalis: "In general it 
 is impossible for the poets to learn enough from the 
 musicians and painters. . . . They should be more 
 poetic and as who should say more musical and 
 picturesque." While the younger Schlegel in his 
 own very best manner raises distraction to its high- 
 est power: " Romantic poetry is a progressive uni- 
 versal poetry. Its mission is not merely to unite all
 
 66 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the separate varieties of poetry and to reconcile 
 poetry with philosophy and rhetoric; it will and 
 must also now blend, now fuse poetry and prose, 
 genius and criticism, art-poetry and nature-poetry." 
 As for Tieck, it must be acknowledged, he is by no 
 means so universal a spirit; he is merely an advo- 
 cate for the poetry of music and the music of poetry: 
 " What! is it not permissible to think in tones and 
 to make music in words and thoughts? " 
 
 In all these quotations, it should be noticed, the 
 word poetry has come to have a meaning so vague, 
 shifty, and ambiguous as to be incapable of support- 
 ing any conclusion — or what amounts to the same 
 thing, as to be capable of supporting any conclusion 
 whatever, an advantage which Wilhelm Schlegel fi- 
 nally pushes home in his Berlin lectures on belles 
 lettres and art by substituting the term " poetics " 
 for the " theory of art " (Kunstlehre) in general. 
 
 All this has a very familiar ring. It is quite in 
 our own way — so much so as to seem rather trite 
 and hardly worth consideration save for the sake 
 of its genealogy. But then, which of the roman- 
 ticists' errors is likely to appear novel in the eyes 
 of their heirs? At the same time, I may be pardoned 
 in the interests of completeness for calling attention 
 to still another obsession and that the most striking 
 and significant of all. I mean that which at bottom 
 a disciple of Freud's might be disposed to think 
 responsible for the whole romantic neurosis. To be 
 sure, there is ever a disposition at periods of ecstatic 
 agitation to confound love erotic with love chari- 
 table. But in this instance the symptom is partic- 
 ularly important because what seems to result from
 
 German Romanticism 67 
 
 a study of the romantic doctrine of passion, is the 
 suspicion that a great part of the disorder of the 
 school was the result of nothing more or less than 
 sexual unrest. The manner in which this sensual 
 ground of uneasiness appears and reappears at fre- 
 quent intervals, like a shoal under ruffled water, is 
 startling. How much of Novalis' piety is due to 
 the loss of his Sophie it is hard to say; but its kind or 
 quality is unmistakable — it bears the marks of a 
 thwarted or perverted desire, a momentary vacancy 
 of the senses. In his own words, " the exaltation of 
 the beloved object to a divinity is applied religion." 
 And equally characteristic of the confusion between 
 Eros and Charity is the jotting in his note-book, 
 " Christus und Sophie." But it is Schleiermacher in 
 his Reden ilber die Religion who puts the official 
 and theological seal upon this notion that " die Los- 
 ung aller Ratsel im Geheimnis der Liebe liege ": — 
 
 " For him who stands alone the all exists in vain, for 
 in order to take up into himself the life of the Universal 
 Spirit (Weltgeist) and to have religion, man must first 
 have discovered mankind, and that he finds only in 
 love and through love. For this reason are the two 
 things so intimately joined ; longing for love, ever fulfilled 
 and ever renewed, comes at once to constitute for him 
 religion. . . . Therefore religion withdraws into the still 
 more confidential intercourse of friendship and the dia- 
 logue of love, wherein face and figure are plainer than 
 words and even a sacred silence is intelligible." 
 
 With these tenets it is hardly astonishing that 
 the promoters of the movement should be, on the 
 whole, so little edifying in their relations with the
 
 68 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 sex. One and all they were dominated not by women 
 but by woman. The gallantry of Wilhelm Schlegel 
 is notorious. For the riotousness of Friedrich his 
 Lucinde is sufficient evidence, not to mention his 
 early letters to his brother. But why multiply ex- 
 amples? The lubricity of Ardinghello seems to have 
 awakened a response in every one of them, even 
 Tieck. And not only this, which might be paralleled 
 in more robust natures; but about all their love af- 
 fairs there is invariably something morbid and un- 
 canny. Caroline was eleven years older than Schel- 
 ling; she was thirty-five and he was twenty-four, 
 when he first fell in love with her. Sophie von Kiihn 
 was a mere child of twelve or thirteen when be- 
 trothed to Hardenberg. I have already spoken of 
 Wilhelm SchlegePs inglorious conquest of Bohmer's 
 widow after her experience in Mainz and her politi- 
 cal incarceration. He seems to have borne with ex- 
 emplary equanimity her infatuation for Schelling, 
 which took place under his very nose, and to have 
 accommodated himself to the liaison with a com- 
 plaisance in no wise short of ignominious. Even 
 after Dorothea's divorce from Veit Friedrich 
 Schlegel insists upon keeping up the irregularity of 
 their relationship as long as possible in sheer de- 
 light apparently in his own depravity. Character- 
 istic too is the well-known passage of his Lucinde 
 in celebration of the transposition of the masculine 
 and feminine roles in love. Schleiermacher himself 
 must needs fall in love with a married woman to 
 begin with and finally marry the widow of a friend. 
 But something too much of this. Touched as 
 lightly as may be, such matters are unpleasant to
 
 German Romanticism 69 
 
 the English genius; were they stressed according to 
 their actual importance for romantic psychology, 
 they would be offensive. 
 
 11 
 
 In itself, therefore, with all its borrowings and 
 ascriptions, its errors and confusions, its lack of 
 literary integrity and moral consistency, German 
 romanticism was something wholly factitious and 
 affected. It could be kept alive only by successive 
 stimulation and galvanization. Hence its cravings 
 for nostrums of all kinds — literary, philosophical, 
 scientific, theological, and mystical. Hypochondriac 
 as it was, it had tried all the doctors in turn — 
 Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, Fichte, Schelling — 
 only to abandon them sooner or later for quacks like 
 Bohme, Baader, and Ritter. By its very nature it 
 was condemned to be forced and excessive, or lose 
 its raison d'etre altogether. Like a wrong headed 
 disputant, it must keep itself in countenance by 
 abounding obstinately in its own bad sense and 
 relying upon the violence and the extravagence of 
 its asseverations. In order to justify its own exist- 
 ence it had no alternative but to browbeat truth 
 and brazen out its own absurdity. For this reason 
 it was always refining, subtilizing, alembicating its 
 own dicta, until it became involved in issueless 
 mazes of paradox and hyperbole. 
 
 As a matter of course the folly and perversity to 
 which it was conditioned by its mode of existence 
 had their roots in the bosom of its founders and their 
 desperate determination to shark themselves up a
 
 70 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 celebrity, whether or no, by bolstering out their own 
 character to heroic proportions. To this circum- 
 stance is due very largely the notion of genius as 
 of something akin to delirium and madness which 
 reigns to-day — or at least divides unequally the 
 honours with the older conception of well-balanced, 
 though exceptional, power. This modern idea of an 
 irresponsible, insensate fatality — " une force qui 
 va," in Hugo's favourite phrase — an impulse at 
 once spasmodic and irresistible, a sort of throe or 
 convulsion of nature, may be taken with due allow- 
 ance as a self-characterization of the romanticists. 
 It was the deification of their own character; and in 
 delineating their heroes they have but portrayed 
 themselves, for their " art," such as it was, had noth- 
 ing impersonal or dramatic about it. Life was a 
 gigantic mirror in which they saw their own figures 
 a thousand times repeated and of colossal dimen- 
 sions. " Mich jiihrt dies in mich selbst zu- 
 riick," confesses Novalis. Or if it failed to admit 
 their pretensions to magnitude, they shut their eyes 
 to it and denied its competence altogether: 
 
 " Ich komme nur mir selbst entgegen 
 In einer leeren Wustenei." 
 
 As a matter of fact they all had been spoiled in the 
 nursery, and spoiled children most of them remained 
 all their lives. The work with which they won a 
 hearing was almost uniformly unfit for publication; 
 in France it would never have got into print at all. 
 It was only the abject poverty of German letters 
 at the time which allowed them to pose as writers,
 
 German Romanticism 71 
 
 and precocious one at that. Tieck's origins are in- 
 credibly crude and mawkish. Friedrich Schlegel's 
 first critical efforts are execrably written and com- 
 posed, and reek of intellectual coxcombry and pre- 
 tension. Novalis is jejune and silly. The best of 
 them all is Wilhelm Schlegel, and he is common- 
 place and foppish. But finding themselves indulged 
 in their whimsicalities and mannerisms, and flattered 
 by their ability to dumbfound the respectable Phil- 
 istine, the Nicolais' and other Aujklarer of the day, 
 they had no incentive to correct themselves and 
 clarify the ferment of their youth. And particularly 
 so, since there was no authority capable of impress- 
 ing or overawing them. For a graphic picture of 
 the spiritual conditions at the time as they appeared 
 even to the romanticists themselves, whose very ele- 
 ment was confusion, I can do no better than quote 
 Schleiermacher : 
 
 " It is a time," he says, " when nothing human remains 
 unshaken; when every one sees just that which deter- 
 mines his place in the world and secures him to the 
 earthly order, on the point not only of escaping him 
 and falling into another's possession, but even of perish- 
 ing in the universal maelstrom; when some not only 
 spare no exertion of their own powers but also call for 
 help on every side in order to keep fast what they con- 
 sider the axes of the world and of society, of art and of 
 science, which are by an indescribable fatality up- 
 heaving as though of themselves from their deepest 
 foundations and are leaving to destruction what has re- 
 volved about them for so long; when others with rest- 
 less impetuosity are busy in clearing away the ruins 
 of fallen centuries in order to be among the first to
 
 72 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 settle upon the fruitful soil which is forming under- 
 neath out of the rapidly cooling lava from the frightful 
 volcano; when every one, even without leaving his own 
 place, is so greatly agitated by the violent convulsions 
 of the universe that amid the general vertigo he must 
 needs rejoice to see a single object steadily enough to 
 hold by it and gradually be able to persuade himself 
 that there is something still standing." 
 
 Amid the universal trepidation Goethe and Schil- 
 ler alone exercised some sort of steadying influence. 
 But even Goethe and Schiller, as I have already 
 remarked, were not invariably level-headed. And 
 by the time the youngsters might have profited by 
 their better example the mischief was done; they 
 were confirmed in their folly to the point of resenting 
 criticism and admonition. They quarrelled with 
 Schiller and even with Goethe, and consorted only 
 with those like-minded with themselves, " Bruder 
 im Geiste." From their early corruption, therefore, 
 they never recovered. If they were not thwart and 
 perverse from the start, they soon became so under 
 the process of deliberate self-cockering and mutual 
 admiration which was the breath of their life. 
 
 Psychologically, their leading motive was egotism. 
 From this one characteristic it would be possible to 
 derive pretty nearly their whole activity. " Das Ich 
 soil sein" The self was their favourite, their exclu- 
 sive pursuit; Selbst-beobachtung, their darling 
 study. It is with utter rapture that Schleiermacher 
 describes the glorious moment when he first discov- 
 ered his I, unique and unmatchable — like Childe 
 Roland's dark tower, " without a counterpart in the 
 whole world " — and recognized it for the founda-
 
 German Romanticism 73 
 
 tion of all morality and religion. Eminently repre- 
 sentative too is the letter written to her husband by 
 Rahel Varnhagen, their disciple, when the cholera 
 was raging in Berlin: " What I want is a death of 
 my own. I won't die of an epidemic like a blade of 
 grass in a field, parched by malaria among its com- 
 panions. I will die alone of my own disease — that's 
 the kind of woman I am." 
 
 As a result the whole history of their ideas is indi- 
 vidual; it is a part of their biography, not of the 
 history of thought. In this sense it is almost physi- 
 ological, like their figures or their faces. In spite 
 of the liberty about which they were always prating, 
 they lay themselves under the very worst of tyran- 
 nies — the tyranny of self. Their intellectual and 
 moral life was as completely subdued to the acci- 
 dents of their own persons as was their digestion or 
 bodily health. Their mental and ethical tone was 
 as exposed to the weaknesses and disorders of their 
 own temperaments and as helpless before them as 
 was their physical tone to the weaknesses and dis- 
 orders of their constitutions. Tieck had romanti- 
 cism just as he had rheumatism — as passively and 
 as unintentionally — however much he may have 
 brooded over it when he once came down with it. 
 So it was that they never succeeded in abstracting 
 their thought — there is nothing universal or even 
 general, impartial, and inevitable about their ideas. 
 
 In no respect, perhaps, is their egotism more strik- 
 ingly shown than in their attitude towards literature 
 and art in general. As litterateurs, ergo artists, at 
 least in intention, they were so deeply immersed in 
 their own profession as to be incapable of seeing
 
 74 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 anything else. Not only was it the one serious con- 
 cern of life, it was also the standard or norm of all 
 other concerns whatever. Even in Goethe the impor- 
 tance attached to aesthetics strikes us nowadays as 
 rather naive, if not actually silly — at all events as 
 beside the mark. The kind of artistry which runs 
 through Wilhelm Meister as the sole preoccupation 
 of every character of any account and which indeed 
 is the one touchstone of character, is quite in the ro- 
 mantic vein and belongs to the same order of things 
 as the Stembaldisieren with which Goethe himself 
 reproaches Tieck. But though Goethe may have 
 given a kind of currency to the idea, it was reserved 
 for the romanticists proper to complete the confusion 
 between art and morality, between the conception 
 of life as an accomplishment and as a duty. As for 
 so many other of our vices we are indebted to them 
 too for the disposition to " literatize " and " arti- 
 cize " life. Indeed, so far did they carry the prac- 
 tice, so impotent were they to think outside of their 
 own categories, so inflated with their own assump- 
 tion that they must needs make existence a play and 
 God an artist also because they, forsooth, were them- 
 selves second-rate literary men. Even Schelling is 
 so carried away with the draught created by these 
 ideas as to place aesthetics above morals, to find the 
 consummation of philosophy in a work of art, and 
 to justify metaphysically the conception, which is 
 represented even by Schiller and Goethe, that the 
 only complete man is the poet — " die Poesie das 
 Hochste und Letzte sei" Heaven forfend! What 
 a world this would be if all of us were artists! But 
 with this conception, at all events, the distinction
 
 German Romanticism 75 
 
 between philosophy and poetry, between art and life 
 is wiped out at one stroke; and reality and fancy 
 mingle in graceful phantasmagoria. " Was wir 
 Natur nennen ist ein Gedicht, das in geheimer, wun- 
 der barer Schrijt verschlossen liegt." 
 
 Subdued as they were to the spell of their own 
 being, they never discovered in all their aspirations 
 after freedom that the only liberty is the liberty of 
 self-restraint. They failed to perceive that life was 
 constantly spreading its snares to involve them in 
 a coil of fatal consequences, in a chain of determi- 
 nations where their independence would be irretriev- 
 ably lost and they themselves would become but 
 creatures and slaves of circumstance. Friedrich 
 Schlegel's Lucinde is to all intents and purposes a 
 panegyric of sexual passion — or love, as he pre- 
 ferred to call it. Its thesis, as far as it can be said 
 to have such a thing, consists with the conviction 
 that the realization of liberty, of the infinite, das 
 Unendliche, is possible through the unbridled grati- 
 fication of this appetite alone. With pitiable short- 
 sightedness he seems never to have reflected that 
 the moment he yielded to his passions, he had be- 
 come enmeshed in a network of influences over 
 which he had no control whatever, that he had com- 
 mitted himself to the conditioned and given hostages 
 to fortune. Only by an act of self-control and 
 denial, only by standing aloof and refraining would 
 it be possible to affirm his ego in withdrawing it from 
 the consequences of its activity. 
 
 " Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet, 
 Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich iiberwindet."
 
 76 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 But consequences was the last thing they thought 
 of; they were totally devoid of discipline. And 
 when they philosophized, they were merely trying 
 to talk themselves into believing what they wished. 
 Their freedom was the freedom to do as they liked; 
 their liberty, the liberty to indulge their own ca- 
 prices. 
 
 Whether the romanticists consciously recognized 
 the discrepancy between their profession of liberty 
 and their actual subjugation to self, it would be hard 
 to say. In any case their whole dialectic was di- 
 rected to the problem of reconciling just these 
 two different notions; though it was only by 
 a kind of sophistry, in invalidating the authority 
 of achieved distinctions, that they succeeded in 
 doing so. By obliterating the line of demarca- 
 tion between the outer and the inner order 
 and reducing the former to a tributary of the 
 latter, by such means alone was it possible to make 
 it appear as though the gratification of impulse, 
 which makes man the slave of circumstance, was 
 after all only a sort of self-determinism. It was for 
 this reason that they welcomed with enthusiasm the 
 philosophy of Fichte, which justified their existence 
 in representing the universe as the creation of a 
 glorified and transcendental ego. Xo doubt Ficht- 
 eanism was in the air, and it was of these cobwebs 
 that Fichte spun it. But it was as symptomatic of 
 romanticism as acceptable to it. 
 
 For this reason their attitude toward nature be- 
 comes extremely interesting. It was to nature that 
 they resorted in the first instance because her pas- 
 sivity had no embarrassments for their self-esteem.
 
 German Romanticism 77 
 
 They sought to her as they did to those of similar 
 mind with themselves. With her they could be 
 themselves, unrebuked and unabashed. They were 
 rid of the clash of wills, of the constraint of human 
 intercourse, of the elementary decency which com- 
 pels even the most obstinate and wilful in society to 
 have some small regard for the rights of others, if 
 for no better reason than a fear of the unpleasant 
 consequences which result from neglecting them. 
 Before nature they could flaunt their own person- 
 ality as arrogantly as they pleased. Above all, they 
 might have of her the supreme satisfaction which 
 the egotist finds in the conviction that his influence 
 is irresistible; they could make her over in their 
 own image so that she should bear their very seal and 
 impress. That they never saw her as she is — pas- 
 sionless, irrational, meaningless, a pure illusion — 
 is clear from their account of her. They saw her 
 only as they were; they discovered in her only 
 what they brought to her. It is after their example 
 that we have learned to identify the moral and the 
 natural world. Cramped as they were by their own 
 limitations, they were incapable of conceiving an- 
 other order distinct and remote from that with which 
 their own consciousness acquainted them. Like 
 Novalis they took nature to be the " systematic in- 
 dex or plan of our spirit " just as we ourselves are 
 " Analogien-quelle fur das Weltall." And in that 
 consciousness of theirs they found little that was 
 not sentimental. They had no principles, no criti- 
 cism — hardly a purpose ; they were moved by acci- 
 dent and caprice. Such is the sense of every word 
 they wrote. Heinrich von Ofterdingen falls in love
 
 78 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 with Mathilde because he happens to feel, on seeing 
 her, as he did in a dream on seeing the little blue 
 flower. It is circumstance alone which determines 
 them in one direction rather than another — circum- 
 stance and mood. And as they were themselves, so 
 they thought of nature — as something equally 
 moody, capricious, and passionate. " Das grosse 
 Weltgemiith " Novalis calls her. It was a later and 
 different turn of romantic thought which by an anal- 
 ogous error made her out a being essentially intellec- 
 tual, while by an inevitable reversal of the original 
 confusion it is man who has become a creature of 
 nature's, a natural product, instead of nature's being 
 an achievement of consciousness, a sentimental cre- 
 ation, a gigantic Kunststuck or transcendental tour 
 de force — or in Novalis' words, " ein Universaltro- 
 pus des Geistes." 
 
 The volte- face is noteworthy. But after all, the 
 two attitudes are only counterparts and are in reality 
 so represented by Schelling, who finally gave a phil- 
 osophical organization to all these indefinite ideas 
 that were crossing in the air. " It is our view of 
 nature," he says, "not that it accidentally coincides 
 with the laws of consciousness . . . but that it 
 necessarily and originally realizes as well as ex- 
 presses those laws, and that it is nature and is called 
 so only in as far as it does this." It follows that " the 
 system of nature is at the same time the system of 
 consciousness"; that "nature is visible mind and 
 mind invisible nature." While, further, " nature 
 thus appears as the counterpart of consciousness, 
 which consciousness itself produces in order to re- 
 turn thereby to pure self-intuition or self-conscious-
 
 German Romanticism 79 
 
 ness." " Hence in everything organic there is some- 
 thing symbolic, every plant bears some feature of 
 the soul." And he ends by transferring the whole 
 scheme of consciousness to external nature, using 
 his metaphysical principles to fill in the gaps in the 
 positive knowledge of the physical universe which 
 existed in his day, exactly as Novalis advises in the 
 Lehrlinge zu Sais: " The careful description of the 
 history of this inner world of consciousness is the 
 true history of nature; through the consistency of 
 the world of thought in itself and its harmony with 
 the universe is formed of itself a system of ideas for 
 the accurate representation and formulation of the 
 universe." 
 
 At this point the confusion has culminated in the 
 complete identification of the law for man and the 
 law for thing. Such is the fallacy of the romantic 
 conception of nature past and present: with Schel- 
 ling it offers man as the measure of nature or else 
 with Renan it offers nature as the measure of man. 
 How much clearer, or at least how much less prejudi- 
 cial is the Greek idea of nature as of something in 
 itself indifferent or inert, as a decoration or accessory 
 of voluntary action or a machine which requires in- 
 telligence to move! It is responsible for the whole 
 marvellous Greek mythology. Between the modern 
 and his landscape there ever swims a haze — the 
 fume of his own distempered imagination: 
 
 " Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten, 
 Im triiben Shimmer liegt die Welt, 
 Es fallt in ihre dunkeln Schachte 
 Ein Schimmer, den wir mit uns brachten."
 
 80 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 With Tieck he is like a man in a trance, a somnam- 
 bulist in a limbo between night and morning: 
 
 " It often happens that the world with all its tenants 
 and occasions reels before my eyes like a flimsy phantas- 
 magoria. And I too seem but an accompanying phantom, 
 which comes and goes and comports itself amazingly 
 without knowing why. The streets look to me like rows 
 of mimic houses filled with silly occupants, who simulate 
 human beings; and the moonlight, shimmering pensively 
 on the pavements, is like a light that shines for other 
 objects and has fallen upon this wretched and ridiculous 
 world by chance alone." 
 
 In this particular, it must be confessed, the hands 
 of the romanticist were again strengthened by the 
 example of Goethe, in spite of his superior clarity 
 of vision and his sterner sense of actuality. For his 
 own part he was never able to conceive of nature, 
 in the passive sense otherwise than as a work of 
 art or in the active sense otherwise than as an artist, 
 for his pantheism involved the one with the other. 
 As such it must exhibit, on the one hand, the same 
 sort of design as any other artistic product, a poem 
 or a statue; at the same time it must proceed, on 
 the other hand, in accordance with certain ideas 
 similar to those which determined his own work. 
 His investigations of nature, therefore, consisted in 
 a series of attempts to explain that design by pene- 
 trating to the ideas behind it. In other words, the 
 universe was an artistic illusion, whose significance 
 resided in the motif which it realized — just as a 
 novel is an illusion whose only principle of coherence 
 resides in the author's conception. Practically,
 
 German Romanticism 81 
 
 therefore, since it was a mere mode of artistic ex- 
 pression, the problem was to find the animating and 
 creative ideas which as artist it was trying to com- 
 municate. It never occurred to him that it might be 
 nothing more than a mechanical what-not — a 
 something which had fallen together and operated, 
 not in virtue of a set of ideas, but in accordance 
 with a set of formulae, that it might be something in 
 and for itself, independent of the consciousness and 
 without reference to it. Hence Schiller's perfectly 
 just objection to his Ur-pflanz, " that is an idea, not 
 a fact.'" In short Goethe was, in reality, not scien- 
 tific, but literary. While art begins by assuming 
 that nature is an illusion, science begins by assuming 
 that it is a reality. While the former endeavours to 
 discover an idea that will give it significance; the lat- 
 ter endeavours to discover a formula which will ex- 
 press the manner in which it works. For this reason 
 the mathematical theory of light was simple nonsense 
 to Goethe. It was not an idea, a creative conception 
 at all; it was a mere modus operandi. On the other 
 hand, in those cases where our organization of the 
 universe is nothing more than the interpretations of 
 the human spirit — or in those sciences which con- 
 sist largely in classification, which are little more 
 than arrangements of data, in accordance with our 
 own notions, and in which the generalizations are 
 in a sense only categories of the human intelligence 
 — in sciences like botany and biology he was quite 
 at home. But even there, notwithstanding his pro- 
 founder divination, he was virtually at one with 
 the romanticists. 
 
 As a result of their exclusive and consistent ego-
 
 82 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tism, when they came to write, they had naturally 
 nothing to write about but themselves. That was 
 all they knew, even if anything else had happened to 
 interest them, as it seldom did. With one or two 
 unimportant exceptions they had divorced them- 
 selves from all the active and practical concerns 
 of existence. At the one end Tieck had disassoci- 
 ated poetry from life and reflection; at the other 
 Schleiermacher had disassociated religion from 
 virtue and morality — " everything with religion, 
 nothing for it." Their forms were almost devoid of 
 content — in short, the form was the content; 
 hence the famous definition of transcendental 
 poetry as the poetry of poetry and their curious 
 doctrine of second powers or the multipli- 
 cation of a subject into itself. The French Revo- 
 lution alone of all the stirring historical movements 
 that were eddying around them, seems to have 
 roused them to a faint flutter of excitement — 
 mainly because they saw a way to turn it over to 
 the account of their own subjectivity. " The French 
 Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and 
 Goethe's Meister," declares Friedrich Schlegel, " are 
 the greatest tendencies of the century." In conse- 
 quence, their own novels are all autobiographies, 
 revamped and redated, but cribbed, cabined, and 
 confined by the writers' own limited experience of 
 themselves. It is so with Sternbald and Heinrich 
 von Ojterdingen, with Lucinde and Hyperion. In- 
 deed, this is Friedrich SchlegePs definition of the 
 romance — an individual confession. And it is 
 equally so even with their philosophies; of Schleier- 
 macher's Monologen Haym remarks: "He talks as
 
 German Romanticism 83 
 
 a man would do to his most intimate friend." In 
 a word, all their writings are personalities and 
 indiscretions. 
 
 It is only natural, therefore, that from the liter- 
 ary point of view their work should be as poverty- 
 stricken as it is. But it was not only so, it was 
 muddled too. As they were puppets of mood, with- 
 out genuine character, all impressions were indiffer- 
 ent. Just as their criticism was destitute of princi- 
 ples, so their creative work, their Dichtung, was 
 destitute of selection. What marked it most conspic- 
 uously was the raw eclecticism which is the note of 
 romanticism everywhere — a seated contempt for 
 the discrimination of a sane and disciplined taste. 
 Hence a mishmash of motives, costumes, cults, civili- 
 zations — Hellenism and Medievalism, Paganismand 
 Christianity — jumbled together in inextricable med- 
 ley. In this respect the elastic dream-economy of 
 Heinrich von Ofterdingen is remarkable and amply 
 justifies by its conveniency the Mdrchen or fairy 
 story as the romantic type par excellence. All their 
 Dichtung is essentially inchoate, as were the two 
 products which served them as paradigms — 
 Goethe's Meister and Tieck's Genoveva. And amid 
 all this ferment and clutter only one distinctly dis- 
 cernible purpose — the desire of these young hot- 
 heads to reproduce the impressions made by life 
 upon their feverish and excited imaginations.
 
 84 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 in 
 
 Evidently, an existence of such unremitting self- 
 exploitation must have been extremely fitful and 
 spasmodic. It must have had its moments of exal- 
 tation, of reckless intoxication and Rausch. But 
 these moments must have been succeeded by inter- 
 vals of desperate reaction and disillusion. Holderlin 
 alone is sufficient proof of it. As a result of this 
 emotional insecurity, no doubt, originated the doc- 
 trine of Transcendental Irony. The title, ostenta- 
 tious as it is, covers nothing more than an attempt, 
 on the part of Friedrich Schlegel in the first instance, 
 to pass off one's mortification at one's failings and 
 shortcomings by being the first to ridicule them when 
 they were too conspicuous to escape general atten- 
 tion. It is a common enough shift in every walk 
 of life for those who are embarrassed by the dis- 
 crepancy between their pretensions and their per- 
 formance to make a virtue of necessity, and by 
 anticipating detraction and taking sides against 
 themselves, to vindicate a kind of critical or intel- 
 lectual superiority over their own practical activities. 
 In such manner the romantic ego had at least the 
 advantage of appearing to know better than it could 
 do and of restoring its authority by a characteristi- 
 cally unprofessional intrusion or supervention upon 
 its own work. Like Victor Hugo's theory of the 
 grotesque the transcendental irony was a tacit con- 
 fession of the writer's powerlessness to produce a 
 perfectly congruous and satisfactory piece of work 
 and an attempt to make a merit of the fact by
 
 German Romanticism 85 
 
 erecting his weakness into a quality. In other words 
 it was an effort to insure the romantic poet against 
 the mediocrity of his own gifts. As Haym, who is 
 usually so reserved in his strictures, remarks in 
 another connection: " This is perhaps the most 
 striking index of romantic poetry — that what is 
 elsewhere an evidence of impotence and banality 
 [Unpoesie] it construes as an indication of beauty 
 and perfection." 
 
 From the point of view which has been gained at 
 present it is impossible to mistake the nature of the 
 transcendental conception of self engaged in these 
 speculations — as of something distinct from all 
 that is tangible, palpable, or in any way apprehen- 
 sible or accountable. It is something quite noncom- 
 mital and irresponsible. It is uncompromised by a 
 man's actions; it is as evidently unprejudiced by his 
 character; nor has it apparently any manifestations 
 by which you can bring it to book. You can not 
 corner it, try as you will. Whatever he is or does, 
 no matter how bete or fatuous or futile he may be, 
 the romanticist has only to reply to your censures: 
 "Ah! you are quite mistaken; that is not I. See, 
 I have quite as much contempt for that sort of 
 thing as you have." Verily, it was a dabster at 
 evasion, this transcendental self. In every instance 
 it eludes you and by a like expedient. It " dema- 
 terializes " like a " spirit " under your very eyes 
 and leaves you gaping foolishly at vacancy. 
 
 Upon morality the effect of such a doctrine was 
 bound to be fatal. This retirement of the real man 
 from his character and occupation, this moral ab- 
 senteeism, provided a ready excuse for all sorts of
 
 86 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 irregularities, which could be represented as merely 
 impertinent to the genuine self. By this means it 
 was possible to excuse any atrocity as transcendent- 
 ally irrelevant and indifferent. And as a matter of 
 fact, the romanticist soon came to understand by 
 morals nothing more than the uses of human nature 
 in its laxest and most inclusive sense. The study 
 of morality was the study of humanity; and it was 
 a consequence of his eclecticism that he embraced 
 in the term the animal as well as the spiritual, the 
 earthly as well as the ethereal. And since the pon- 
 derable, if once admitted, is likely to weigh the 
 heavier in the balance, it happened more often than 
 not that his morality was, in the ordinary accepta- 
 tion of the word, very immoral indeed. In fact, 
 Schleiermacher makes no bones about proclaiming 
 " the immorality of all morals." While further, as 
 humanity is infinitely various, it will follow that 
 there are as many moralities as there are 
 human beings. It is again Schleiermacher who 
 with great complacency makes the flattering 
 discovery that the ego possesses a morality as unique 
 as its individuality. Perhaps Lucinde is as good a 
 map as we have of human nature after the romantic 
 morality, where humanity is likely to display itself 
 very much as it is. But alas for Schleiermacher, who 
 went to the pains of defending it! it is not only a 
 nasty book it is also a stupid one. 
 
 " Der Pedantismus bat die Phantasie 
 Um einen Kuss; sie wies ihn an die Siinde. 
 Freeh, ohne Kraft umarmt er die, 
 Und sie genas von einem toten Kinde, 
 Genannt Lucinde."
 
 German Romanticism 87 
 
 And its viciousness as well as its stupidity, like that 
 of the school behind it, consists in its licentiousness, 
 in the rejection of every principle of restraint or 
 control. The conception of obligation as such seems 
 never to have dawned upon this gentry. As Goethe 
 said of the Schlegels, " Unhappily both brothers lack 
 some sort of inner check to hold themselves together 
 and keep them fast " (" Leider mangelt es beiden 
 Briidern an einem gewissen innern Halt der sie zu- 
 sammenhalte und jesthalte "). About their conduct 
 there is always something shifty, unreliable, incal- 
 culable — it is subject to a kind of aberration which 
 seems to withdraw it from the province of morals 
 altogether and relegate it to that of whim, caprice, 
 and haphazard. It hardly belongs with the rational 
 and providential at all. It very nearly substantiates 
 their own claim of identity with nature. 
 
 It is in this respect that German romanticism 
 differs most strikingly from New England transcen- 
 dentalism. The parallelism between the two is too 
 close and obvious to be overlooked. To read Tieck 
 is, in many cases, like reading Hawthorne translated 
 into German, or vice versa. I am disconcerted by the 
 similarity every time I reread them. Not only is 
 there a resemblance of general tone and spirit be- 
 tween Hawthorne's sketches and such stories of 
 Tieck's in particular as the Blonde Eckbert and the 
 Runenberg; but there is also a resemblance of style 
 and treatment, as is obvious from comparing the 
 opening of The Great Stone Face with that of Die 
 Freunde or Die Elf en. And so, likewise, with Nov- 
 alis and Emerson there is in both the same character- 
 istic sententious, fragmentary manner, the same
 
 88 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 brachylogy. And what is so amazing, is that the 
 scholars and literary historians would have us be- 
 lieve that there was no direct discipleship on the part 
 of the Yankees. But however this may be, the 
 leading ideas of the two schools or movements were 
 much the same; their philosophy of life was, as a 
 philosophy, identical. What New England trans- 
 cendentalism amounted to in the end, as we have 
 had a chance to see in this generation, was, like Ger- 
 man romanticism, the apotheosis of a purely ideal 
 and sentimental ego above character and conduct at 
 large, and the arbitrary elevation of the dicta of 
 this ego into a code of morality. 
 
 To be sure, Emerson was himself a man of char- 
 acter and he assumed the ego to be possessed of 
 such character because he was. But it was just the 
 weakness of Emersonianism that in its adoption by 
 others it was bound to take on the peculiarities of 
 those who adopted it — and they might have char- 
 acter, or more frequently, as it has turned out, they 
 might not. In other words, there was nothing in 
 the original doctrine to guarantee or ensue character. 
 And it is on this account that transcendentalism has 
 again become the philosophy of an age and a country 
 in which the general level of moral action is conspic- 
 uously low. It is just the philosophy for a race and 
 a generation with our notions of liberty and self- 
 interest — for a race and generation which wishes to 
 be free to defraud its neighbors in the morning and 
 boast of its moral elevation in the evening. It 
 affords a sentimental refuge for self-esteem in any 
 emergency. It enables us in the handiest way in 
 the world to redeem the baseness of our practice by
 
 German Romanticism 89 
 
 the nobility of our sentiments. No matter how low 
 our behaviour, how contemptible our acts; our gen- 
 uine self remains untouched. Herein lies the expla- 
 nation of the curious anomalies of our civilization — 
 our unscrupulous and oppressive money-getting on 
 the one hand and our ostentatious and munificent 
 benevolence on the other; our sordid living and our 
 grandiose declamation — the morose might call it 
 hypocrisy; we call it idealism. 
 
 To make Emerson and the romanticists respon- 
 sible for all these consequences seems at first thought 
 unfair. In his own case there is present one 
 idea whose absence is thoroughly indicative of the 
 German transcendentalists as well as of contempo- 
 rary idealists. Emerson was still animated by a sense 
 of duty. Whether it was a survival of his descent or 
 an independent acquirement of his own, the con- 
 sciousness of responsibility and guilt had not yet 
 faded from his mind. Though this conception does 
 not appear explicitly in his work, perhaps, it was 
 implicit in his character. It is virtually taken for 
 granted, even though it may never be mentioned; 
 and it is in this particular that his utterances have 
 an immeasurable superiority over those of the Ger- 
 mans. The transcendental idea of liberty had suc- 
 ceeded in retrenching the categorical imperative alto- 
 gether. Liberty consisted in following your own 
 bent. Whatever gave the self range and opportunity 
 was moral. In short, morality was egotism. Into 
 this error Emerson never slipped. But it must be 
 remembered that it was romanticism pure and 
 simple that he preached; and that in preaching it 
 at all, he is justly accountable for the results.
 
 90 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 In other respects Hinduism too offers an edifying 
 contrast with transcendentalism. In one sense they 
 were both systems of the ego. While the latter, 
 however, is optimistic; the former, on the contrary, 
 is pessimistic. It all lies in that. The note of ro- 
 manticism is eclecticism — indifferency, promiscuity. 
 The note of Buddhism is discrimination, distinction, 
 reservation. What saves Buddhism, in short, is its 
 dualism; that is, its freedom from confusion. To 
 the transcendentalist nature was but an extension of 
 the ego; human nature was but " sister to the moun- 
 tain " and "second cousin to the worm"; the in- 
 sentient was but an alter ego of consciousness. To 
 the Hindu nature was a derogation to the genuine 
 self. And with nature we must understand all that 
 part of human nature which was liable to " natural " 
 law. Hence liberty for the Buddhist lay in the self- 
 restraint which enabled him to withdraw more and 
 more from the influence of the fleeting, the imper- 
 manent, and the earthly until he should emancipate 
 himself wholly from the law for thing, the mechan- 
 ical determinations of a material cosmos, and ensue 
 the higher and spiritual, the true self. Whereas 
 Hinduism would make religion consist in a recogni- 
 tion of the distinction between the eternal and the 
 impermanent, the one and the many, and in an effort 
 to establish the former; romanticism in the person 
 of its evangelist, Schleiermacher, would find the in- 
 finite everywhere and in everything and would swal- 
 low up both the one and the many in a miscellane- 
 ous all. " The meditation of the pious is only an im- 
 mediate consciousness of the universal, of all that is 
 finite in the infinite and through the infinite, of all
 
 German Romanticism 91 
 
 that is temporal in the eternal and through the 
 eternal. To seek and find this in everything that 
 lives and moves, in all that grows and changes, in 
 all that acts and suffers and to have and know life 
 itself only in immediate feeling as this being — this 
 is religion." An illimitable diffusion, a boundless 
 dissipation, an unceasing flux of sensation and emo- 
 tion in which all distinction and definition melt 
 away in shifty confusion — such is the last word of 
 the romantic religion as it is of the romantic ethics 
 — endless dissolution.
 
 NIETZSCHE 
 
 Tod dem Schwachen 
 
 ON ACCOUNT of the attention which Nietzsche 
 has been attracting of late, the occasion seems 
 a favourable one for reviewing once more his life and 
 work. In a letter to one of his acquaintances, writ- 
 ten March, 1884, he himself prophesies with the 
 proverbial modesty of genius that " in fifty years, 
 perhaps, will the eyes of some few (or of one, for it 
 requires genius) be opened to what has been done 
 through me. For the present, however, it is not 
 only difficult but quite impossible (in accordance 
 with the laws of ' perspective ') to speak of me pub- 
 licly without falling boundlessly short of the truth." 
 To be sure, the time of which he spoke is not yet 
 up ; but since men's eyes are turned in that direction, 
 it is fair to assume that the subject is not without 
 interest at present. 
 
 1. LIFE 
 
 As for his life the critic's task is comparatively 
 easy. In one sense his thought is his life. But 
 although his life is singularly narrow, his thought, 
 as often happens in such cases, is unintelligible with- 
 out an understanding of his character; and hence 
 
 92
 
 Nietzsche 93 
 
 the very paucity of incident serves only to increase 
 the difficulty of exposition. A rich and varied exist- 
 ence is virtually self-explanatory; a limited and 
 unadventurous one, on the contrary, since it offers 
 little or no surface to the critic, requires all sorts of 
 commentary and exegesis for its illumination. For 
 that reason what I have attempted is quite as much 
 characterization as biography. 
 
 Nietzsche — christened Friedrich Wilhelm after 
 the reigning king of Prussia, his father's patron — 
 was born at Rocken on the border of Saxony on 
 October 15, 1844. The stock of which he came was 
 distinctly clerical, a fact which may account for 
 some of his personal peculiarities, to say nothing of 
 his antipathy for Christianity when he had once 
 apostatized. His father, his grandfathers, one or 
 more of his uncles were all evangelical pastors, while 
 his paternal grandmother was of similar strain. Ac- 
 cording to a vague tradition the family of Nietz- 
 sche was remotely of Polish origin and noble descent 
 — an extraction which so flattered Friedrich's aris- 
 tocratic propensities that he made at least one elab- 
 orate attempt to substantiate it. 
 
 In 1849 occurred the death of his father, Karl 
 Ludwig by name, in consequence apparently of a 
 serious fall, which had reduced him to helplessness 
 some time before this fatal result. On the basis of 
 this lingering prostration of his father's, efforts have 
 been made to prove that Friedrich's ill-health and 
 mental disease were hereditary; but they appear to 
 be anything but conclusive. In later life there is 
 none of his misfortunes which Nietzsche more re- 
 gretted than the accident which deprived him of
 
 94 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 parental companionship and guidance during his 
 youth and early manhood; and it was only in the 
 friendship of Wagner that he found anything like 
 compensation for the loss. In addition, an atmo- 
 sphere of bereavement is not the most healthful for 
 a precocious and introspective child; and after the 
 death of his little brother Joseph, when the family 
 
 — consisting of his mother and his sister, Elizabeth 
 
 — had removed to Naumburg on the Saale, where 
 they lived with his father's mother and two maiden 
 sisters, it is possible to detect the influence of these 
 surroundings on his disposition and character. At 
 the public school, to which he was sent at the age 
 of six, he was known as der kleine Pastor, the little 
 minister, on account of his decorum and gravity — 
 such is the material out of which future " immoral- 
 ists " are made. Even at that age he seems to have 
 shown something of the priggishness which charac- 
 terized him more or less throughout life and was 
 particularly conspicuous during his brief stay at 
 Bonn. 
 
 His years in the private school to which he was 
 transferred the following twelvemonth, as well as in 
 the gymnasium which he entered in 1854, affected 
 his development, no doubt, as they were intended to 
 do; but the most decisive event of his youth was 
 his admission to Pforta in 1858. Pforta may be 
 described briefly as an endowed school of rather 
 severe cloistral tradition and discipline, once a Cis- 
 tercian abbey, with a reputation for the incubation 
 of scholars. Nietzsche's intellectual life had begun 
 early. Even at fourteen he wrote respectable verse, 
 he already composed music, and was concerned for
 
 Nietzsche 95 
 
 problems that never occur to most Americans during 
 the entire course of their lives. As a genius, to be 
 sure, he may be thought to be an exception. But 
 after all the case is not so unusual abroad; and it 
 is no exaggeration to say that in spite of our com- 
 plicated system of education the French or German 
 student in what corresponds to our preparatory 
 school is far more mature intellectually than the 
 mass of our college or university graduates. 
 
 In his early years at Pforta Nietzsche founded a 
 kind of artistic and literary society, with two of his 
 young Naumburg friends, for their independent cul- 
 ture and development. Each of the three members 
 was to submit monthly a musical composition, a 
 poem, or an essay, which was reviewed by the chron- 
 icler for the quarter. Every three months a formal 
 meeting was to be held, at which each member 
 should present one of his own productions. Among 
 Nietzsche's titles may be mentioned the following: 
 Byron's Dramatic Works; Napoleon 111 as Presi- 
 dent; Siegfried, a Poem; Fatum and History; The 
 Demonic in Music. Throughout his life, as may be 
 inferred from this sort of venture, he was ever pre- 
 occupied — too exclusively so for healthy-mind- 
 edness — with his own intellectual development, to 
 which he frequently found his prescribed duties a 
 hindrance or an impertinence. On the whole, how- 
 ever, he may described, in his sister's words, as a 
 model student while at Pforta in all subjects except 
 mathematics, which he had no taste for and neg- 
 lected, and science, in which he seems to have made 
 no great progress. Nor is the circumstance unim- 
 portant for his after thinking — particularly when
 
 96 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 his scientific pretensions are taken into account. It 
 constitutes one of his most serious limitations — to- 
 gether with his slight acquaintance with anthropol- 
 ogy and ethnology. A knowledge of some other 
 antiquity than the Greek and an initiation into the 
 natural and social sciences might have saved him 
 from several preposterous vagaries, even if they had 
 not modified profoundly the general bent and direc- 
 tion of his thought. From the first, however, his 
 liking was for what the Germans call philology; his 
 favorite subjects were Greek and Latin, particularly 
 the former. 
 
 In spite of the fact that his residence at Pforta 
 was his first absence from home and he was subject 
 to the shyness and the nostalgia of his kind, his 
 health and spirits were sound, and for all his self- 
 centrednesss he made at least two warm and lasting 
 friendships — one with Paul Deussen, the other with 
 Freiherr Carl von Gersdorff, who clung to him pretty 
 faithfully during life. 
 
 In the fall of 1864 he entered the University of 
 Bonn, where he fell under the influence of Ritschl, 
 the philologist. In the first enthusiasm of his new 
 life as student he allied himself with a corps, Fran- 
 conia, only to become offended by the loose, coarse 
 manners of his companions — their Biermaterialis- 
 mus, as he calls it. It was not for nothing that he 
 had grown up beside a doating mother, grandmother, 
 and two maiden aunts, to say nothing of an adoring 
 sister younger than himself; and he soon provoked 
 the dislike of his comrades by his tactless attempts 
 to reform their habits. As a result he grew thor- 
 oughly disgusted with Bonn and retained all his
 
 Nietzsche 97 
 
 days a prejudice against German conviviality, 
 though he himself became an immoderate consumer 
 of drugs and opiates. Any one who spends the 
 evenings in beer-drinking and pipe-smoking, he pro- 
 nounces, is quite unfit to understand him or his 
 philosophy, because such an one must necessarily 
 lack the fine clarity of spirit essential to the com- 
 prehension of such nice and profound problems as 
 those he is concerned for. The fact is that he was 
 always most at ease by himself, as he afterwards 
 confesses. Extremely sensitive to anything like 
 oppositions of character and opinion, he never felt 
 thoroughly at home, perhaps, except with his sister 
 and one or two of his intimates of the moment — 
 though strangers and casual acquaintances he seems 
 to have found less disquieting than others. A crav- 
 ing for friendship in the abstract he appears to have 
 had; but the type of friendship he desired was that 
 of master and disciple. Like most of us he probably 
 longed for the moral stimulant of approval and ad- 
 miration; he liked to see himself advantageously re- 
 flected in the eyes of others. But most of his actual 
 friendships ended disastrously and not all of them 
 with dignity. It was to his sister that he owed the 
 most; with the exception of a few years of marriage 
 she has devoted her life to him and his memory. To 
 her exertions, it is not too much to say, some part 
 of his present fame and currency is due. She has 
 written two lives of him — a larger and a smaller 
 one; she has collected and edited his works; she 
 has founded a Nietzsche archive at Weimar and has 
 got together and preserved every extant note and 
 scrap of writing in his hand, including his letters,
 
 98 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 which she has been able to come at; she has de- 
 fended his character against posthumous detraction 
 and she has laboured incessantly to enlarge and ex- 
 tend his reputation. Whatever her brother's genius, 
 she at all events is in her way a sister who deserves 
 celebration with Renan's and Pascal's, with Henri- 
 ette and Jacqueline. 
 
 In the fall of the next year (1865) Nietzsche left 
 Bonn for Leipzig, partly for the sake of ridding 
 himself of the embarrassments he had incurred in 
 the former place and partly for the sake of following 
 Ritschl, who had been called to the latter university. 
 Of Nietzsche's formative period the three great in- 
 fluences were Greek antiquity, Schopenhauer's phil- 
 osophy, and Wagner's music and personality. The 
 first of these dates from his boyhood — specifically, 
 perhaps, from his schooling at Pforta, though he was 
 interested in the subject as a boy might be even 
 earlier and played Homer while yet a child. But 
 the Greek antiquity that actually inspired him and 
 seriously affected his life and thought was a Greek 
 antiquity of his own invention, not that after the 
 tame official pattern — a Greek antiquity that never 
 existed for any other than himself. The second 
 formative influence, that of Schopenhauer's philoso- 
 phy, dates from his first year at Leipzig. In one of 
 his autobiographical sketches he has an interesting 
 account of stumbling upon a copy of the great pessi- 
 mist in the stall of a bookseller with whom he lodged, 
 of carrying it off to his rooms, and of immersing 
 himself in the contents with a conviction of having 
 at last found the key to the riddle. And conceivably 
 enough there was much in Schopenhauer to suit his
 
 Nietzsche 99 
 
 humour at this time. Temperamentally there was a 
 kind of perversity, a sort of offishness, a disposition 
 to see things wrong side out that was after his own 
 heart. While conceptually the idea of existence as 
 a representation would appeal to a something artis- 
 tic in his nature — which he himself developed later, 
 in his own manner, into the dogma of life as a vital 
 illusion, intelligible only as a work of art, the diver- 
 sion of an uneasy god for the relief of his own ennui 
 and discomfort. Nor is his final philosophy of the 
 will to power unbridgeably remote from Schopen- 
 hauer's notion of the will to existence as the funda- 
 mental principle of life. There is even at this time 
 a prognostic of his future " immoralism " in one of 
 his letters dated April 7, 1866, where in describing 
 a storm by which he was overtaken in one of his 
 walks, he exclaims: 
 
 " What were man and his fretful desires to me! What 
 to me was the eternal ' thou shalt ' and ' thou shalt not ! ' 
 How different the lightning, the storm, and the hail — 
 free unethical forces! How blessed, how strong are they, 
 pure will, untroubled by the intellect! " 
 
 At Leipzig, too, during his first year he established 
 a kind of superior or advanced Germania, the Phil- 
 ological Society, and made what he calls his first 
 friendship founded on a moral and philosophical 
 basis — with Edwin Rohde, a fellow student; 
 " W eltanschauungsbruder " he names him. 
 
 On the whole he appears to have been at this pe- 
 riod a rather superior young person with a turn for 
 self-analysis and Selbstqualerei — a Qualgeist in his 
 own words — oppressed by a heavy sense of his
 
 ioo Romance and Tragedy 
 
 responsibilities to himself. In his letters of this or 
 a little later date it is possible to detect those dawn- 
 ing suspicions of philology and philologists and their 
 value as a discipline or culture — even a glimmering 
 distrust of modern education in general — which 
 were finally to make him objectionable to his own 
 profession and which he developed in his Untimely 
 Considerations. In short, he begins already to be- 
 tray a little of that self-sufficiency of opinion which 
 became his leading intellectual characteristic. 
 
 In the autumn of 1867 he began his term of mili- 
 tary service in an artillery regiment stationed at 
 Naumburg. He was extremely near-sighted, an in- 
 firmity which he blames for many of his embarrass- 
 ments of one kind and another; and on that account 
 he had supposed himself exempt from military duty. 
 But the requirements had recently been lowered, 
 such was the need of recruits; and he found himself 
 within the army net after all. While he performed 
 his tasks punctiliously and to the satisfaction of his 
 officers, he was not particularly happy in them be- 
 cause of his separation from his friends and his 
 intellectual pursuits. His career, however, was cut 
 short in the early part of the following year by an 
 accident to his chest, incurred while mounting his 
 horse and due to his shortsightedness. So severely 
 was he hurt that it took him five months to recover. 
 His return to Leipzig in the fall of 1868 as a 
 private teacher is remarkable as the occasion of his 
 introduction to Richard Wagner, who was visiting 
 a sister, the wife of Professor Brockhaus. 
 
 In the beginning of 1869, before he had yet taken 
 his doctorate, he was appointed extraordinary pro-
 
 Nietzsche 101 
 
 fessor of classical philology at Basel with a salary 
 of 3000 francs. Thereupon Leipzig granted him his 
 degree without thesis or examination. The appoint- 
 ment was due largely to the recommendation of 
 Ritschl and was considered a remarkable honour for 
 a man of Nietzsche's age. With his usual reserves, 
 however, he himself failed to look upon it as a sub- 
 ject of unmixed self-congratulation — he had been 
 planning a sojourn in Paris in the interests of his 
 further education; and it was with some sense of 
 disloyalty to his aspirations that he finally set out 
 for his post in the spring of 1869. His entrance 
 address was delivered on May 28 and seems 
 to have made a mild sensation. It consisted 
 of a discussion of the Homeric problem with 
 particular reference to the ideal office of phi- 
 lology in human life. His lectures were attended 
 by an audience of eight — the entire body of 
 philological students at Basel, together with one 
 theologue. In addition to his courses in the uni- 
 versity he had some school-teaching in the ancient 
 languages. In any proper sense, however, his pro- 
 fessional work as such lies outside of his develop- 
 ment and may be disregarded save as it affects the 
 latter through his material circumstances. His 
 growth from now on is virtually independent of uni- 
 versities; from this point of view it is his intimacy 
 with Richard Wagner which is the event of his 
 residence at Basel. 
 
 As Nietzsche's conception of truth may be said to 
 constitute the paradox of his thought or philosophy, 
 so his relations with Wagner constitute the paradox 
 of his life or experience. That the same man who
 
 102 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 wrote the invective contained in Wagner's Case and 
 Nietzsche contra Wagner should once have been 
 Wagner's familiar and intimate seems incredible or 
 monstrous. For years he had known and admired 
 one or two of the musician's earlier operas — the 
 Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde. But it was 
 not until the period of his professorship that he fell 
 completely under Wagner's influence. At that time 
 the Wagners were living in obscurity at Tribschen 
 near Basel — Wagner himself; Cosima, his wife, 
 formerly von Billow's; and Siegfried, the son — and 
 there Nietzsche visited them in accordance with an 
 invitation extended him at Leipzig. The intimacy 
 was soon cemented; the strength of the Master's 
 personality and the seduction of Cosima's exerted 
 their natural effect upon the dazzled young profes- 
 sor, whose fresh and ingenuous admiration must 
 have warmed and tickled the disappointed old sen- 
 sualist delightfully; Wagner was then about sixty 
 years old and a disciple of Feuerbach before Nietz- 
 sche converted him to Schopenhauerism. The 
 younger man, for his part, must have been im- 
 mensely flattered by the attentions of a genius, whom 
 he himself had had the perspicacity to discern amid 
 the general blindness and density of the contem- 
 porary public. In a short time he became almost a 
 member of the family. " After Cosima, you — 
 and then for a long way, no one," protests Wagner 
 in a letter to his address. While in his turn Nietz- 
 sche produces upon the altar of friendship The 
 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, a singu- 
 lar compound — a centaur, the author well named 
 it — in which a fanciful theory of Greek tragedy
 
 Nietzsche 103 
 
 is supplemented, in the very spirit of the first gen- 
 eration of romanticists, by a fantastic derivation of 
 Wagnerian opera from Athenian (or as Nietzsche 
 would say, Dionysian) tragedy. As a sacrifice to 
 the temple the tribute was complete. The Wag- 
 ners were enraptured with it. But Nietzsche's col- 
 leagues were dumbfounded and offended at its 
 extravagance. Even he himself acknowledged later 
 that he had prostituted his scholarship to his infat- 
 uation and had ruined his academic reputation for 
 the sake of the Wagners. As a result students were 
 warned away from the university; for a year his 
 class-room was deserted, Basel was destitute of 
 students of classical philology. 
 
 The fate of this first book of his, however, was in 
 no wise exceptional. As a matter of fact, all of 
 Nietzsche's writings were a disappointment, if noth- 
 ing worse, to his friends and well wishers. Even 
 the staunchest of them, with one or two possible 
 exceptions, fell away from him as he proceeded with 
 the development of his peculiar doctrine — partic- 
 ularly after the appearance of Human All Too Hu- 
 man. During the latter part of his short career, 
 what with misunderstandings and quarrels, he found 
 himself pretty nearly alone in the world, save for his 
 devoted sister and his faithful adherent, Koselitz, 
 known to Nietzscheans as Peter Gast. 
 
 It is his alienation from Wagner, however, that 
 he regards with constant bitterness as the great 
 tragedy of his life. To account for that sequestra- 
 tion is anything but easy. For three years the 
 friendship continued with unabated warmth until 
 the Wagners left Tribschen for Bayreuth in expec-
 
 104 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tation of carrying through the project of the great 
 opera-house. Thereafter the two parties saw each 
 other only occasionally. Relieved of Wagner's im- 
 posing presence, Nietzsche had an opportunity to 
 make a return upon himself and to think his own 
 thoughts unhindered. That Wagner had deflected 
 his ideas to a certain extent is unquestionable. Wag- 
 ner's was an exigent personality, tyrannous and 
 intolerant, and not indisposed to take possession of 
 another, body and soul. That Nietzsche had early 
 begun to conceive reserves, even concerning Wag- 
 nerian opera, is evident too. But the crisis was 
 postponed until the presentation of the Ring of the 
 Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876. That others beside 
 Nietzsche were disappointed and disabused by the 
 performance appears from his sister's biography. 
 Was this the great idealistic movement of the future 
 — this mercenary, flirting, faineant concourse; w r as 
 this the stuff of noble reforms and vital enthusi- 
 asms? Nor was the opera itself with its veiled sen- 
 sualism and neurotic excitability what the youthful 
 Schwarmer had heard in his imagination. 
 
 Psychologically, it is only natural that as we begin 
 to lose importance for an undertaking that under- 
 taking should likewise lose importance for us. As 
 long as Nietzsche saw his own person interested in 
 Wagner and his work, so long it is intelligible that 
 he should have been the latter's admirer and sup- 
 porter. While Wagner is generally unrecognized 
 and at odds with the world, so long is there an obvi- 
 ous distinction in standing his friend and in recog- 
 nizing what few or none else has the wit to see. As 
 his preferred interpreter and appreciator Nietzsche
 
 Nietzsche 105 
 
 is on a level with him — in a sense he is a superior. 
 He can congratulate himself that Wagner's fame, 
 if it ever rises, is in part his own work. But as 
 soon as Wagner removes to Bayreuth and finds him- 
 self on the road to success, surrounded by a crowd 
 of flatterers and fawners among whom his quondam 
 friend is numerically lost, just so soon Nietzsche 
 becomes disaffected. And so, too, somewhere near 
 the same time he ceases to feel sufficiently illustrated 
 by his discipleship to Schopenhauer; he is discon- 
 tented at deriving or seeming to derive from another 
 — such dependency, no matter how renowned, is 
 no longer a sufficient title of distinction. At this 
 stage it is apparent that if Friedrich Nietzsche is 
 to have a philosophy, it must be a creed peculiarly 
 his own. There has broken in upon him the bril- 
 liant conception of the reversal or transvaluation of 
 all values. And to this task he addresses himself 
 in his Human All Too Human, a book which I take 
 to be the index of the beginning of his second period. 
 Some years afterward he describes his own state 
 of mind at this time, and the description is impor- 
 tant because it helps to span the gap which exists 
 in his written record between his first and second 
 periods — a gap which it is hard to bridge except by 
 a reference to his own consciousness. 
 
 " A great and ever greater detachment, a capricious 
 straying afield, an estrangement, a cooling off, disen- 
 chantment — only this and nothing more was what I 
 longed for in those days. I tested everything to which 
 my heart had hitherto clung, I reversed the best and 
 dearest things and looked at them wrong side to; while
 
 106 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 with everything upon which the human art of slander 
 and abuse had heretofore been exercised the most skill- 
 fully, I did the contrary." 
 
 The procede is evident and it is characteristic. 
 
 I have dwelt so long upon the case of Wagner be- 
 cause it is not merely the most important episode 
 in Nietzsche's objective existence and is also the 
 turning point, the hinge of his career, but because 
 it illustrates a peculiarity of his mind without which 
 it is impossible, it seems to me, to understand either 
 the man or his philosophy. From some cause or 
 other his consciousness was extremely susceptible 
 to polarization. Almost any idea which attracts his 
 attention to begin with, ends almost invariably by 
 violently repelling him. Hence he is always at one 
 extremity of opinion or the other, without mediating 
 between the extremes or occupying the intervening 
 space. By this mental idiosyncrasy is to be explained 
 or at least expressed his final alienation from all his 
 friends as well as his hostility to every idea in which 
 he was brought up — to Christianity, morality, re- 
 spectability, and decorum, middle-class smugdom, 
 scholarship, philology — even to his own character 
 and being. In fact, it serves pretty nearly as a 
 formula for all his philosophizing: what else in its 
 essence is his great discovery of the transvaluation 
 of all values? 
 
 In the meanwhile, during his intimacy with Wag- 
 ner, his academic duties were momentarily inter- 
 rupted by the Franco-Prussian War, which he 
 followed for several months as a member of the 
 ambulance corps, since his naturalization as a Swiss
 
 Nietzsche 107 
 
 citizen prevented him from fighting with the Ger- 
 man army. From this excursion, which was a reign 
 of horror to him and haunted his dreams for long 
 afterward, he returned with a severe dysentery and 
 diphtheria, of which he was cured with some diffi- 
 culty and with lasting damage to his digestion. How 
 much these infections had to do with his breakdown 
 a few years later it is impossible to determine. The 
 problem of his health is an exceedingly teasing one, 
 upon which it is hardly safe for a stranger and a 
 layman to venture. Nor in one sense is it a partic- 
 ularly important one in itself. That he should have 
 thought and written so much about it himself is nat- 
 ural enough; in the critic the same interest is a 
 symptom of morbid curiosity. What is certain and 
 important is that soon after the war his health began 
 to fail. He was tormented by atrocious headaches 
 and nausea, which reduced him to a misery of help- 
 lessness. In one year, he reckons, he lost a hundred 
 and eighteen days in this wise. After a year's leave 
 of absence and a renewed attempt to carry his aca- 
 demic work he was finally obliged to resign his 
 professorship in 1879, at the age of thirty-five, after 
 having filled his position ten years. Of its own ac- 
 cord the University of Basel granted him a pension 
 of 3000 francs annually. On this sum, together 
 with his own private income of 400 marks or so a 
 year, he continued to live — mainly in Italy and 
 Switzerland, wandering back and forth between the 
 peninsula and the Engadine, with occasional flying 
 visits to Germany, now worse, now better, but al- 
 ways reflecting, composing, publishing until the end. 
 That Nietzsche suffered from suppressed or incip-
 
 108 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 ient madness the greater part of his life or that his 
 work is that of a maniac — charges which are still 
 repeated and which may owe their vogue to Nordau's 
 Degeneration — such a notion is absurd. The mys- 
 terious nature of his malady may have something to 
 do with such suspicions of his mental sanity. Even 
 his doctors disagreed among themselves. At first it 
 was supposed that the seat of the disease was the 
 stomach. But his sister in her latest biography 
 speaks as though it were now authoritatively 
 referred to his eyes, which were painfully near- 
 sighted and which were at times so badly affected 
 as to incapacitate him for reading or writing — a 
 condition which was regarded at the time as 
 a secondary symptom. As for his mind, however, 
 that appears, until just before his prostration, 
 to have been as sane as a modern genius' usually 
 is. 
 
 On the other hand, that his consciousness was 
 affected by his ill-health, and indirectly his thought 
 too, there is every reason to believe. Indeed, the 
 fact is proved by his practice of composing in short 
 detached passages, whose length varies with his 
 condition. His constant preoccupation with the 
 matter is pretty good evidence too. He is forever 
 trying to make out that he is strong and vigorous 
 or else that his sickness is an advantage and a priv- 
 ilege. Either his disease is but excess of health, or 
 it is a kind of tonic — at least a moral purgative. 
 And his sister is troubled by the same preoccupation. 
 The coincidence argues some ground of uneasiness 
 on the part of both which they were equally anx- 
 ious to allay.
 
 Nietzsche 109 
 
 As an invalid he oscillates between two poles. In 
 the first instance he was eager to justify or excuse 
 his own condition. Hence his early pleas in favour 
 of ill-health as a means of discipline and illumina- 
 tion. Later, however, with the growing conception 
 of the superman his admiration of strength becomes 
 predominant, though it is still on the basis of his 
 own experience that the part which pain comes to 
 play in the education of the superman is to be ex- 
 plained; who can not bear pain in his own person 
 and in that of others is unworthy of the election. 
 Physically invalided himself he values nothing so 
 much as force and robustiousness. Hence his later 
 efforts to refer his ills to a surplusage of health 
 and vigour. Envying a plentitude of life above 
 everything, he comes to believe that every one is 
 animated by the same emotion and to propose the 
 will to power as the moving principle or instinct of 
 life. His superman, too, as the realization and em- 
 bodiment of this will to power, has the characteris- 
 tics of his creator. His ideal is not the ideal of the 
 strong man; it is the ideal of the weak, who is pos- 
 sessed by the consciousness of his own powerlessness 
 and who in acute attacks of mortification would like 
 to revenge his own debility upon his neighbour. 
 
 After his resignation from Basel Nietzsche's life 
 was in the main a solitary one. Most of his early 
 friends had fallen or soon fell away from him, es- 
 tranged by his outrageous opinions. Nor was he 
 himself the man to suffer a partial allegiance. He 
 complains frequently of Wagner's illiberalism ; but 
 in his own case there was nothing more irksome than 
 the presence of those whom he suspected of reserves
 
 no Romance and Tragedy 
 
 against him and his ideas. " I am not strong 
 enough," he says, " to contend continually with all 
 the secret thoughts, the unspoken contradictions of 
 my friends." After his break with Wagner he seems 
 never to have enjoyed free intercourse with a man 
 of his own stature capable of holding head against 
 him. His associates were younger men or women, 
 or inferior intellects or characters. In this way he 
 missed the correction that he might have gained 
 from criticism and opposition. This disregard of 
 others may serve to explain a kind of overbearing- 
 ness in the expression of his ideas, which accounts 
 in turn for their offensiveness to the generation for 
 which they were written. For after all, there was 
 nothing so very singular, even forty years ago, in 
 the substance of his thought; it was no more obnox- 
 ious in itself than the ethics of Helvetius and Hol- 
 bach. But its temper is entirely different. There 
 is an intentness, together with a very perceptible 
 contemptuousness, about the expression which pro- 
 duces another impression altogether. It is the per- 
 sonality of the author as revealed in his style — a 
 something wilful and disquieting. His habit of 
 abusing things accounted sacred, his disrespect for 
 great traditional personages, his manner of apos- 
 trophizing ordinary humanity as " cattle " and 
 " brutes " and " beasts," and current morality 
 as the morality of the "herd"; his own assump- 
 tion of superiority as an " immoralist " and a 
 "Freigeist" and a " maker of values"; his reck- 
 lessness not only of the reader's prejudices and 
 prepossessions but also of the difficulties and 
 obscurities of his own exposition — these traits
 
 Nietzsche in 
 
 irritated and offended and repelled the public, 
 who must have felt something of the same impa- 
 tience and indignation as the members of his corps 
 at Bonn when he tried to lecture them on their 
 manners. 
 
 In addition to lack of recognition his later life 
 was embittered by two incidents — his sister's mar- 
 riage and departure to Paraguay with Forster and 
 the undignified and ridiculous entanglement with 
 Lou Salome, afterwards Frau Andreas. That Nietz- 
 sche should have resented his sister's marriage as 
 a defection is not astonishing in view of the fact that 
 Forster represented principles that were thoroughly 
 distasteful to him — vegetarianism and anti-Semi- 
 tism — while the colonizing expedition to Paraguay 
 was in his opinion of an abhorrently levelling or 
 democratic tendency. The breach, however, was 
 only temporary; even before his sister's departure 
 he had become reconciled to it — the worst of the 
 affair was that he was deprived of her ministrations 
 at the very time when he stood most in need of them. 
 
 The affair with Lou Salome was more intricate 
 and likewise more amusing. Nietzsche had always 
 been eager for disciples. In the beginning and 
 during his first period he seems to have nursed the 
 belief that he was actually addressing himself to 
 some portion of the youth of his time and country. 
 Of this audience, which he supposed to be secretly 
 in sympathy with such views as his, he dreamed of 
 making himself the prophet and leader. This elect, 
 he thought, was ready and waiting for the word and 
 would rise and rally upon him when he had once 
 spoken it. The disappointment which followed upon
 
 ii2 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the successive publication of his writings was one of 
 the great mortifications of his life. Under these 
 circumstances, when one of his oldest friends, the 
 elderly Fraulein von Meysenbug, wrote him that she 
 had at last discovered his disciple, his satisfaction 
 struggled with his incredulity. That the disciple 
 was a young woman of twenty-four was apparently 
 no drawback, though Nietzsche himself seems at 
 times to have caught a fleeting glimpse of the ab- 
 surdity of the whole affair. 
 
 In reality, the young lady — Lou Salome by name 
 — who w r as a Russian touring Europe with her 
 mother, appears to have been something of an ad- 
 venturess and tufthunter and was probably attracted 
 to the pursuit of Nietzsche by his friends' report 
 of him as a celebrity. That she was naturally clever 
 is evident from the manner in which she played up 
 to the ingenuous philosopher. In spite of her 
 mother's amazed denials she represented herself as 
 a martyr to truth, whose youth had been consumed 
 in a fruitless search of wisdom; and she completed 
 her conquest by composing a poem To Pain, which 
 ravished Nietzsche by its reflection of his own ideas. 
 If any further doubt of her eligibility lingered in his 
 mind, it was dispelled by her assurance, quoted in 
 his correspondence, that she was a woman without 
 morality — videlicet, an " immoralist." In accord- 
 ance w T ith her conception of " Freigeisterei " she pro- 
 posed to seek some university, where she might re- 
 side in company with him and his friend Dr. Ree, 
 the ethic philosopher. This offer, however, seems to 
 have shaken the gentleman a little; and as a via 
 media Fraulein von Meysenbug suggested that one
 
 Nietzsche 113 
 
 of the men should marry her. The suggestion 
 proved unacceptable: Nietzsche declined because of 
 his poverty and Dr. Ree because of his principles 
 — he was a pessimist and viewed the continuance of 
 his species with horror — a devotion to conviction 
 which Nietzsche highly applauds. For these reasons 
 the project was abandoned; Lou Salome was obliged 
 to content herself with private lessons in the Nietz- 
 schean philosophy under the chaperonage of its 
 author's sister. Is it necessary to add that as soon 
 as the pupil discovered that her master was not the 
 personage that he had been represented by his 
 friends, her ardour for his teachings began to cool? 
 In the chill of reaction her conduct and language 
 gave just offence to Nietzsche's sister; and at last 
 Nietzsche himself discovered her genuine character 
 and her perfect indifference for his ideas. Worse, 
 he became suspicious of some hugger-muggery on 
 the part of Dr. Ree; and the affair closed with an 
 embroilment of all parties and left for years a sour 
 taste in Nietzsche's mouth. 
 
 This episode I have related in some detail, not for 
 the sake of ridiculing Nietzsche, but by way of illus- 
 trating his ignorance of human nature — a subject 
 of which a great moralist might be expected to have 
 some knowledge or apprehension. Unlike La Roche- 
 foucauld and La Bruyere he had, indeed, no pro- 
 found experience of mankind in the large. He had 
 lived for no great length of time in any great centre 
 of thought or activity. He had known few men of 
 light and leading — save Wagner. He had frequented 
 no very distinguished circles and listened to no ex- 
 change of significant ideas. He spent his time pretty
 
 ii4 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 much in solitude, in isolated lodgings, or casual 
 boarding-houses. His study of human nature was 
 confined almost exclusively to himself and his own 
 anxieties. At the same time, his reading was re- 
 stricted for years by the weakness of his sight, while 
 the bulk of his earlier studies was necessarily scho- 
 lastic. As a result his moral philosophy was in large 
 part erdacht not erlebt; it was spun out of himself 
 and in so far liable to error — it was constantly in 
 danger of losing touch with actuality and of forget- 
 ing Pascal's pensee de derriere. These were the char- 
 acteristics that grew upon him toward the close of his 
 career. It is dangerous for the moralist to make a 
 habit of himself; even the exaggeration of his own 
 qualities is a misfortune. But it was particularly 
 hazardous for Nietzsche, with his excitable temper, 
 like some unstable explosive, and with his disposi- 
 tion to megalomania. With Zarathustra the convic- 
 tion of his prophetic role is inalterably fixed. " I am 
 that predestined being," he declaims, " who is to 
 determine values for centuries." He goes out of his 
 way to vituperate Wagner, Socrates, and Jesus, 
 whom he looks upon as his personal rivals. He 
 revolves about himself and his own centre more and 
 more dizzily and light-headedly. Never remarkably 
 continent in the assertion of his own importance — 
 at least in his letters to his friends — his exaltation 
 and extravagance increase from day to day. He 
 projects a systematization of his philosophy and 
 plans to give the gestation of the work the benefit of 
 a visit to Corte in Corsica, where Napoleon was 
 conceived. As the end approaches he loses all sense 
 of measure, and in the final paroxysm of his reason,
 
 Nietzsche 115 
 
 with the relaxation of his inhibitions, he subscribes 
 his letters with the names of Dionysus and the 
 Crucified. 
 
 It was such signatures as these which aroused the 
 suspicions of his friends in Basel and brought Over- 
 beck thence to Turin, where Nietzsche then was. 
 On his arrival Overbeck found that he had suffered 
 what seemed to be an attack of paralysis and that 
 his mind was seriously affected. This was in De- 
 cember, 1888, while unfortunately his sister was still 
 absent in South America. He was brought to Basel 
 and thence transferred to an asylum in Jena. In 
 the course of another year he was removed to Naum- 
 burg, where he was cared for by his mother and 
 later by his sister, who returned to Germany after 
 the death of her husband in Paraguay. On the death 
 of his mother in 1897 his sister carried him to Wei- 
 mar, where she nursed him devotedly until his death 
 in 1900. 
 
 II. DOCTRINE 
 
 Such in outline was Nietzsche's life. To sum- 
 marize his thought is by no means so easy. Not only 
 were his ideas constantly shifting with his mood and 
 surroundings, but he was an unsystematic thinker 
 by profession. In addition, there is an inclination 
 on the part of the hierophants of orthodox Nietz- 
 scheism to soften and mollify and sweeten whatever 
 is harsh or bitter or offensive in his philosophy — 
 to accommodate his teaching to the taste of the 
 public and so denature it. To read his sister's ex- 
 positions you would think it less a philosophy of
 
 n6 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 revolt than a philosophy of reservation. Contempo- 
 rary criticism, too, in accordance with its usual 
 character, has been wonderfully indulgent and has 
 contented itself, as a rule, with picking out what it 
 could commend without much regard for ensemble 
 or general tendency. Under these circumstances it 
 would be difficult enough to methodize his doctrine; 
 but the difficulty is increased tremendously by his 
 habit of writing in detached and disconnected para- 
 graphs, whose length fluctuates with the changes of 
 his bodily temperature, ranging from the compass of 
 an aphorism to the dimensions of a brief section or 
 chapter. His composition, too, was done largely 
 out of doors during his solitary walks or rambles. 
 No literary work was ever more dependent upon its 
 author's health and spirits than was his; for this 
 reason his philosophic periods are pretty nearly a 
 physiological record, and it may be well to classify 
 them roughly before I undertake to sketch his 
 system. 
 
 If we leave out of account his youthful and 
 prentice work, his first or coherent period extends 
 from his appointment to Basel in 1869 to the year 
 1876 and the rupture of his friendship with Wagner. 
 The principal writings included in this period are 
 The Birth oj Tragedy and the Untimely Considera- 
 tions. I have named this his coherent period be- 
 cause the work of this time has the form of 
 consecutive essays or articles. The inspiration of 
 the period is undoubtedly Richard Wagner; its 
 leading idea, the conception of the world as an 
 aesthetic product. In The Birth oj Tragedy he under- 
 takes, in his turn, a favourite exercise of the first
 
 Nietzsche 117 
 
 generation of German romanticists — the deduction 
 of German from Greek literature. But whereas the 
 efforts of his predecessors were directed toward 
 establishing Goethe as the heir of Greek antiquity, 
 his own were bent upon making Wagner the suc- 
 cessor of ^Eschylus and what he termed Dionysian 
 tragedy. At the same time, he labours also to sub- 
 stantiate the hypothesis already referred to, that the 
 universe is intelligible only as a work of art, a kind 
 of play or dramatic spectacle, perhaps, for the 
 recreation of a weary creator. Elsewhere, as in The 
 Future of Our Educational Institutions and David 
 Strauss and The Advantages and Disadvantages of 
 History, appear presages of his revolt against the 
 received and current ideas of his age and society — 
 his contempt for German pedantry and German 
 Kultur in general and for the reigning historical 
 methods of thought and scholarship. For the mod- 
 ern Prussian intellectualism, which has found such 
 a ready acceptance in American education, never 
 had a more relentless enemy than Nietzsche. 
 Always a revolte, a mutineer, an insurgent, he can 
 not be understood unless there is taken into account 
 his disposition to rise against established ideas and 
 institutions. At all events, such is the direction of 
 his evolution — toward a consistent and habitual 
 opposition. 
 
 His second period, which may be called inclusively 
 his incoherent or aphoristic period, stretches from 
 1876 to the end of his intellectual career in 1888. 
 During these years not only is his strength insuffi- 
 cient for consecutive composition but as a result 
 and with his neurasthenic inclination to erect
 
 n8 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 his weaknesses into virtues he begins to look upon 
 discursive thinking as a symptom of decadence. 
 It is at this stage of his development that his writings 
 come to take on the tone that we think of as dis- 
 tinctly Nietzschean — timidly at first but more and 
 more audaciously as he proceeds. His revolt has 
 begun. And it is against his veritable self as well 
 as everything representative of his age that his 
 attack is directed. Himself he is weak and sickly 
 and neurotic, limited in experience by means and 
 health and opportunity; the offspring of a Christian 
 evangelical stock; a tame, middle-class, German 
 scholar; a more or less conscionable creature, prig- 
 gish, thin-skinned, and sentimental; a romanticist 
 by disposition, with a philosophical descent from 
 Rousseau through Kant and Schopenhauer; while 
 the thing he admires is — Cesar Borgia, the bold, 
 strong, unscrupulous, remorseless human animal, the 
 " great blond beast," grasping, encroaching, aggres- 
 sive, disciplined for conquest, the master of power 
 and success, imperial and aristocratic (vornehm is 
 his word), in short, the very thing he was not, but 
 the very thing he would be — the very thing, per- 
 haps, that in his Dionysian intoxication he may have 
 fancied himself. Nothing at first thought could be 
 stranger — save to the alienist — than to find a 
 man blaspheming his own virtues in a series of 
 staccado denials wrung from him by his own debility. 
 It all indicates how little he knew himself. He 
 expatiates upon his modesty and warns himself 
 against self-depreciation as his besetting sin; but 
 he has no hesitation in speaking of himself as " the 
 most independent mind in Europe and the only Ger-
 
 Nietzsche 119 
 
 man writer," while elsewhere he denominates him- 
 self a " fatality " and in the same letter, to Brandes, 
 remarks that " in ten years the whole world will be 
 writhing in convulsions " on his account — a proph- 
 ecy of which some credulous critics believe we are 
 now seeing the fulfilment albeit a little tardily. In 
 his own opinion Zarathustra is " an event without 
 parallel in literature and philosophy and poetry 
 and morality," while he considers himself to be " by 
 all odds the most independent and profoundest 
 thinker in the grand style extant." As for any one 
 who has the slightest conception of his significance, 
 he is convinced that such an one must start out 
 with the postulate that he has had a wider experi- 
 ence in his own person than any man who ever lived. 
 In a word, his professions concerning himself are 
 utterly unreliable. But nevertheless it is impossible 
 to understand him without reckoning with this in- 
 stinctive reaction against himself as a creature of 
 his civilization which constitutes the motive of the 
 second and characteristic period of his intellectual 
 being. 
 
 For convenience, however, this general period may 
 be split into two minor or sub-periods. The first 
 is composed of a crepuscular stage reaching to 1882, 
 which is represented by the collection of apothegms 
 entitled Human All Too Human, 1878, and Miscel- 
 laneous Opinions, 1879. During this interval his 
 health was very bad and his spirit correspondingly 
 affected. As a consequence these utterances are 
 the briefest of any he has written — sometimes but 
 a few lines in length, hardly more than breathless 
 jottings — generally destructive in character, search-
 
 120 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 ings or gropings in the dusk of his own consciousness. 
 His line is not wholly clear to him as yet; though as 
 the Einsamer, the recluse, the great solitary genius, 
 as whom he has begun to pose, it is clear to him that 
 he will not be contented with any ordinary philoso- 
 phy. Of philosophy, particularly of moral philoso- 
 phy, indeed, he has come to be exceedingly jealous; 
 he grudges her any lord but him. Hence his mount- 
 ing scorn of Plato and Socrates; hence his rising 
 suspicion of Jesus, though he has not succeeded in 
 rationalizing his distaste for these personalities so 
 consistently as he will yet do. 
 
 As his health improves, his temper becomes rather 
 more sanguine; he gains a little greater mastery 
 over his logical processes; his aphorisms lengthen — 
 and there begins to dawn what I will call his auroral 
 sub-period from the title of its principal work, 
 Aurora (Morgenrothe) 1881, which was followed in 
 1882 by The Merry Science. Save for the improve- 
 ment in his mental tone and the increased length of 
 his paragraphs it would be difficult to state in so 
 many words the difference between this sub-period 
 and the preceding. The one is merely a develop- 
 ment and prolongation of the other. His ideas are 
 more clearly denned and he is more certain of him- 
 self and of his mission — or Aujgabe, as he calls it. 
 He has become more set and confirmed in his own 
 way of thinking. His style grows more tense and 
 vibrant, and as happens with most authors, begins 
 to react upon his thought and determine to some 
 extent what his ideas shall be. But his work remains 
 essentially destructive; it is still the immorality of 
 morality with which he is concerned. As far as he
 
 Nietzsche 121 
 
 may be said ever to have had a constructive impulse, 
 it is in his next or final stage, which may be called his 
 vertiginous period, being marked by numerous allu- 
 sions to dancing, floating, soaring, rope-walking, and 
 such like dizzy acrobatic exercises. Its principal 
 productions are Zarathustra, the Nietzschean bible, 
 and Beyond Good and Evil. It is to this stage of 
 his life, as I have just said, that his constructive 
 ideas, if so they may be called, belong. It is the time 
 of " the Everlasting Recurrence " and the " Super- 
 man," the conception of the new morality or disci- 
 pline, the training for conquest — it is the ja-sagende 
 period or period of affirmation. 
 
 As such it is dominated by the fantastic figure of 
 Zarathustra as his earlier period was dominated by 
 that of Wagner. Not that Zarathustra is himself 
 the perfected superman or consummation; he is 
 rather the Wegweiser, the guide or the teacher of 
 the higher order. In his manner he is the mature 
 embodiment of the Nietzschean heroic — a concep- 
 tion tentatively expressed in two of the Untimely 
 Considerations, in Schopenhauer as an Educator and 
 Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. To a certain extent 
 he is nothing but Nietzsche himself magnified and 
 enhaloed by the fumes of the Dionysian Rausch or 
 inebriation. As this vision grows upon him, his 
 language enters upon an apocalyptic stage, which 
 becomes ever more nervous, shrill, and exalted as 
 the crisis approaches. 
 
 Such are Nietzsche's chief literary dates and titles. 
 To reconcile all the opinions emitted during these 
 years would be an impossible task. There are few 
 ideas, I suppose, in whose favour it would not be
 
 122 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 possible to quote a text from Nietzsche, if there 
 were any point in doing so. All the expositor can 
 do in such a case is to launch himself upon his 
 author's traces relying on his own scent to keep him 
 somewhere near the trail. 
 
 To begin with, then, Nietzsche professed a pro- 
 found contempt for the value of truth as such. In 
 Plato's Republic there is a curious passage, which 
 every one will recall, to the effect that every system 
 of government is founded at bottom upon a lie — 
 or more diplomatically, a convention of some sort. 
 So Plato in his turn proposes rather diffidently that 
 in the interest of social distinctions the members of 
 his polity shall be instructed that they are all chil- 
 dren of the earth and hence brothers but that they 
 are formed of different metals, some more precious 
 than others. To be sure he apologizes for the gross- 
 ness of the falsehood, though if he had lived long 
 enough to hear of the infallibility of majorities, he 
 might have spared his self-reproaches. But at all 
 events, in his general principle Nietzsche would have 
 cheerfully concurred. According to the latter the 
 test of an idea is not its truth but its utility; that is, 
 its power to abuse society to its own advantage. 
 " The world with which we have to do," he says, " is 
 false — or in other words, it is not a fact but the 
 poetization (Ausdichtung) and rounding out of a 
 meagre sum of observations; it is in a state of flux 
 as of something becoming, a constantly self-shifting 
 falsehood, which never approaches truth for — there 
 is no truth." While elsewhere he defines this truth 
 which is not, as " a kind of error without which a 
 certain kind of living being could not exist."
 
 Nietzsche 123 
 
 This, then, is the basis of the Nietzschean phi- 
 losophy — a disbelief in truth as a fruitful and 
 practical human motive. To be sure, men have mis- 
 takenly devoted themselves to the pursuit of truth 
 as a high and sacred calling. But whenever they 
 have done so, they and the race have suffered for it. 
 " For what has humanity paid the most dearly and 
 for what has it been penalized the most severely? " 
 he demands, and answers pitilessly, " For its 
 truths." What man lives by is illusion, imagination 
 — error. In fact, so riddled and worm-eaten with 
 falsehood is the life of man that it is impossible to 
 comprehend the world as the work of a moral being; 
 its origin is explicable by an artist-creator alone. 
 In his contempt for anything like an absolute stand- 
 ard, in his conception of substance only as a shift- 
 ing illusion Nietzsche is not so very far removed 
 from the position of the pragmatists. If anything, 
 however, the advantage of clearness, even of honesty 
 is so far on his side. At all events he avoids the 
 confusion, the ambiguity of confounding being with 
 becoming; he declines to apply the term truth to 
 a set of connotations which are entirely different. 
 And as usual he suffers the drawback of his honesty. 
 To confess to a philosophy of falsehood would seem 
 in itself enough to discredit the thinker — one 
 reason, perhaps, why the pragmatists have stuck to 
 the name of truth while shuffling away the reality. 
 What confidence are we to place in the conclusions 
 of a moralist who posits the undesirability of truth 
 and the vital necessity of falsehood? The predica- 
 ment is a serious one: either his ideas are true but 
 worthless or else they are useful but false. Perhaps
 
 124 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 it would not be improper to speak of this as 
 Nietzsche's intellectual paradox — though as a 
 matter of fact the attentive reader encounters any 
 number of others in attempting to harmonize the 
 utterances of this spasmodic and inconsequent 
 thinker. 
 
 At all events, his premises involve the disgrace of 
 reason — a position in which he anticipates the anti- 
 intellectualists. Indeed, it is not a little creditable 
 to Nietzsche's shrewdness that almost all our modern 
 heresies — what we are denominating just now our 
 advanced ideas, though they are pre-Socratic, most 
 of them — find an oracular mouthpiece in him — 
 with the one exception of social democracy. He was 
 born to be the prophet of the one-sided and unbal- 
 anced. It is they who have made his reputation as 
 it is he who has given them tongue. Only in this 
 instance, as he has continued to use the reason as an 
 instrument of demolition after disqualifying it, he 
 has thrown a certain suspicion upon the soundness 
 of his own coinage. 
 
 Be this as it may, thus much of his thought is 
 certain. The fundamental principle of existence is 
 not the thirst for truth — that is a sign of decad- 
 ence; the worst enemy the vital principle has ever 
 known is knowledge. The living instinct is, in 
 reality, the will to power. Superficially, the idea is 
 not unlike the underlying conception of the Welt 
 ah Wille und Vorstellung and was unquestionably 
 suggested by his study of Schopenhauer — in fact, 
 most of his views are either transformations or in- 
 versions. But whereas the latter philosopher sees 
 the whole impulse and motive of existence, formally
 
 Nietzsche 125 
 
 at least, in the mere desire or will to live, the former 
 sees it in what he considers the vastly more potent 
 instinct of personal expansion and aggrandizement. 
 In simple terms, life is to Schopenhauer nothing 
 more or less than a bad habit, a vice of which we 
 may break ourselves as a race by a kind of passivity 
 or resignation of will. To the author of such a view 
 humanity is bound to seem a sorry spectacle; his 
 system is an unrelieved pessimism centring about 
 the one cardinal virtue of pity. But to Nietzsche, 
 who prides himself upon his optimism — he remarks 
 very shrewdly that no one so badly off as he can 
 afford to be a pessimist; it would look like sheer 
 petulance — to him such an hypothesis as Schopen- 
 hauer's is not only temperamentally unacceptable but 
 is inadequate to account for the tremendous vigour 
 and variety, the elan of life as he interprets it. Not 
 mere existence is the aim and end of existence, not 
 the bare sustaining of life from day to day, any more 
 than the discovery of truth for its own sake; but 
 assertion, enlargement, development. No being 
 worthy of the name is content with a mere minimum 
 or even a modicum of possession material or other. 
 On such a theory progress, even evolution itself is 
 unthinkable; creation would remain forever station- 
 ary; possibility would vanish. But every living 
 creature, plant and animal alike, is constantly strug- 
 gling, striving to free its elbows, to stretch its 
 boundaries, to wrench a little more from opportun- 
 ity. The struggle for existence, with its corollary 
 the survival of the fittest, implies more than passive 
 adaptation to environment; it implies encroachment, 
 aggression, domination whether over nature herself
 
 126 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 or other organisms. Look at the very character 
 and conditions of nutrition; we must prey upon 
 something living if we ourselves are to live. Con- 
 quest is the law of life. 
 
 The genesis of the idea, as related by Nietzsche 
 to his sister, is conclusive to its character. It was 
 during the Franco-Prussian War, in which he took 
 part as a member of the ambulance train, that he 
 was resting one evening on a stone wall by a little 
 town in the trail of the army. All of a sudden he was 
 roused from his reverie by the thundering hoofs of 
 a squadron of horse galloping past, followed by the 
 crashing of a detachment of artillery and the pound- 
 ing of a body of infantry marching at double-quick. 
 The whole spectacle was so imposing as a display 
 of organized force that " I felt," he says, " for the 
 first time . . . that the strongest and highest will 
 to live does not come to expression in a wretched 
 struggle for existence but as a will to fight, a will to 
 power and domination." Consistently he always 
 prided himself upon his own truculence. In a letter 
 to Brandes, written in the last year of his life, he 
 remarks: " I was born on the battlefield of Liitzen; 
 the first name I heard was that of Gustavus Adol- 
 phus. ... I understand the management of two 
 arms, the sabre and the cannon. ... I am by 
 instinct a brave, even a military animal." 
 
 In brief, Nietzsche's fundamental principle is the 
 principle of imperialism, as its genealogy shows. 
 And the worst is that with Nietzsche the conception 
 never rises above its individualistic form. Beyond 
 the imperialism of the individual to the imperialism 
 of the group or nation, much less to that of the race
 
 Nietzsche 127 
 
 where human expansion may happily find its full 
 activity in the subjugation of nature — to such a col- 
 lective outlook Nietzsche never attains. His teach- 
 ing is purely selfish and egotistic and anti-social. It 
 insists that the whole justification of society con- 
 sists in the production of exceptional individuals. 
 It is for its great men that the state exists; the 
 genius is the sole raison d'etre of humanity — even 
 his own ethics has no ostensible defence and inten- 
 tion save as the morality of genius. To the " herd," 
 to the " others," who are the mere means or tools 
 for the production and maintenance of the genius, 
 it has no application whatsoever. Slavery, in fact 
 if not in name, is an indispensable institution for the 
 promotion of this one object for which society exists. 
 All great polities and nations have been slave-states, 
 as witness Athens, Sparta, and Rome. As a matter 
 of fact, men are divided naturally into just two 
 classes — commanders and obeyers, masters and 
 slaves; and it is only an identical proposition to say 
 that the former are the state. With numbers and 
 averages and complexes he has no patience. At best, 
 his ideas may be said to answer to the facts of the 
 physical and biological sciences — that is, the 
 " natural " sciences ; with the moral sciences so- 
 called it has nothing to do. Hence its one-sidedness, 
 its deceptive appearance of plausibility when viewed 
 physiologically, and its lurking air of insincerity 
 as of one suppressing a portion of the truth, a teller 
 of half the story. And even had Nietzsche supplied 
 the defects in his education by a later study of the 
 newer and more social sciences, he would still have 
 suffered as a moralist from his aristocratic bias. In
 
 128 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 restricting his attention to the genius — that is, 
 by definition to the exception — and what was worse, 
 to the study of himself as such, he was bound to 
 falsify the moral problem; for the ordinary man, 
 for humanity the main affair of morals must always 
 be a concern for duty, for obligation not for pre- 
 rogative or privilege; while still further, his igno- 
 rance of feminine psychology, of woman, of one 
 entire sex crippled him even more seriously, if any- 
 thing, as a moral investigator. 
 
 To return to Nietzsche's point of view, however, 
 it is evident from what precedes that not truth but 
 the will to power, the instinct of imperialism is the 
 one genuine standard of all values. Since it is the de- 
 sire for expansion and enlargement which is the vital 
 principle — not the thirst for knowledge or even 
 the modest instinct of self-preservation — it is 
 by the first touchstone that every conception, every 
 institution is finally to be tried. Does it stimulate 
 and increase and exalt the vitality, it is good; does 
 it check or weaken or depress the activities, it is 
 bad. Such, in his view, is the explanation of the par- 
 ticular eminence of Greek tragedy in its best days. 
 And it is remarkable for the persistency of his under- 
 lying ideas that the Birth of Tragedy, one of his 
 earliest works, should conform in its large outlines 
 to principles which come to definitive expression only 
 years later. That his belief in the will to power 
 should have been inspired by his reading of Greek 
 philosophy seems impossible; it is much more likely 
 that his interpretaton of antiquity reflects his study 
 of Schopenhauer. But then consider what Friedrich 
 Schlegel made of the Greeks. There is apparently
 
 Nietzsche 129 
 
 something peculiarly exciting and unsettling for 
 such unbalanced brains in this particular literature. 
 It is probably on this account that the Greeks 
 whom Nietzsche extols are pre-Socratic; Plato and 
 Euripides represent for him the decadence of phi- 
 losophy and drama. But in the flourishing of Greek 
 tragedy — a " Dionysian " tragedy — of which Ms- 
 chylus marks the term, he sees an heroic attempt 
 on the part of the Greeks to steel their souls to the 
 rigours of life. Neither a weak nor a happy people 
 could have conceived such a drama. His theory 
 of dramatic origins is rather grotesque, certainly 
 unconvincing; but it is interesting for the distinction 
 it draws among the faculties, a distinction which 
 serves in a measure as a map of his own mind. 
 According to this classification human nature and 
 with it the sources of human inspiration are parti- 
 tioned into two parts or sides — the Apollonian and 
 the Dionysiam ' Roughly, the Apollonian is the 
 intellectual; it is the constructive, architectonic fac- 
 ulty or faculties; the Dionysian is the instinctive, 
 non-plastic, and musical faculty. To be sure, these 
 definitions are too clear and definite to represent 
 Nietzsche quite correctly; the characteristic state 
 which he assigns to each is by no means so lucid as 
 my statement would seem to imply. As a matter of 
 fact, it is dreaming which he assigns as the typical 
 activity of the Apollonian spirit, having in mind, I 
 suppose, the vivid evocative and visualizing power 
 of the dream; while to the Dionysian spirit he 
 assigns the typical condition of inebriation or 
 Rausch, the state of pregnant though chaotic sug- 
 gestion. The dream and the Rausch — these are
 
 130 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the two poles which Nietzsche sets to the axis of 
 human genius. For himself he prefers the latter. 
 
 In this curious symbolism or mythology Dionysian 
 not only becomes synonymous with oriental and 
 anti-Christian, but it also comes to stand for the 
 natural and universal, in contrast with the rational 
 and intelligible, which are essentially Apollonian. 
 It is the ground of nature — the bas-jond evidently 
 — whereon all humanity can meet as on the lap of 
 a common mother. It is the source of vital inspira- 
 tions, the foundation of native originality. It is the 
 source to which the Greek genius owed its greatness, 
 until those unconscionable reasoners Socrates and 
 Plato and Euripides — men of restraints and inhibi- 
 tions — succeeded in corrupting it with their colour- 
 less discourse and in introducing an Apollonian de- 
 cadence. It is true, the idea shifts somewhat under 
 Nietzche's hand; at some periods he himself is more 
 Apollonian than at others, though on the whole it is 
 the emerald effulgence of the orgiastic divinity which 
 fills his pupils and colours his vision. In the main, 
 however, this is the sense of the distinction, what- 
 ever face it may wear at any particular moment. 
 Nor is the conception without ingenuity — the sort 
 of perverted ingenuity which was a part of Nietzsche 
 even at his worst. It has the advantage of serving 
 as a kind of symbolic or even mythic interpretation 
 of some of the facts of common experience. There is 
 an analogy, even though fanciful, between intoxi- 
 cation and inspiration — a kind of fecund vagueness 
 of consciousness ; while the paralysis of the usual in- 
 hibitions of sobriety produces a subjective, factitious 
 sense of enlargement and liberty. On the other
 
 Nietzsche 131 
 
 hand, the brief though vivid splendour of the dream 
 with its penetrating and haunting visions is no bad 
 image of the formative phantasy which shapes and 
 realizes the crowding and inchoate suggestions of 
 the Rausch. Such is the upshot of Nietzsche's 
 dramatic theories. And further, the association of 
 the two gods themselves is not without significance. 
 In particular, the figure of Dionysus Zagreus dilates 
 in Nietzsche's mind until it has grown into the an- 
 tithesis to that other sacrifice, the Nazarene, whom 
 he distrusted so — both slain but to what different 
 effect; the one the afhrmer and lover of life, the other 
 its denier and evader. 
 
 In the meanwhile, before the opposition of Dio- 
 nysian and Apollonian had assumed quite these 
 proportions, Nietzsche was concerning himself, from 
 the very opening of his second or incoherent period, 
 in testing the reigning morality by the criterion 
 afforded by his will to power. In reality, I am not 
 sure that his condemnation of morality was not 
 fairly complete before he had definitely formulated 
 the principle by which to justify it. Certainly, his 
 revolt against morality was the more instinctive 
 and was undoubtedly due to suspicion of it as a 
 hindrance to the free expansion of life and vitality. 
 Judged by the will to might, as Nietzsche under- 
 stood it, the current morality of his day, as of ours, 
 has not a leg to stand on. It is benumbing, depress- 
 ing, crippling — a dam to the stream of self-expan- 
 sion. Like Plato, to whom it is partly due, its last 
 word is restraint and suppression. It inculcates 
 meekness and long suffering, pity and unselfishness, 
 self-denial and repression. Its code is a series of
 
 132 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 prohibitions: its highest wisdom is to refrain. Like 
 the commandments its mouth is full of do not's. In 
 sum. it is a morality of denial, a no-saying, a veto 
 morality. It is a morality for the weak and dispir- 
 ited and lowly, in whom resignation and obedience 
 are the cardinal virtues; not for the strong and san- 
 guine and successful, whose merit lies in conquest. 
 It is a slave morality — and from the slave Nietzsche 
 derives it and by the character of the slave he ex- 
 plains it. 
 
 For Xietzche's philosophy the point is capital. 
 Divested of his questionable etymologies and 
 ethnologies, the distinction between the master 
 and the slave morality, upon which his theory 7 of 
 morals depends, is about as follows. Naturally, there 
 is nothing absolute to Nietzsche about any moral 
 code or standard. He has got rid of the notion of 
 absolute with that of substance. A morality is at 
 bottom a set of expedients originally invented for 
 the advantage or conveniency of its promoters. 
 Such a set of prescriptions becomes petrified or crys- 
 tallized after a while into something fixed and ap- 
 parently inalterable. When so set. it exerts a 
 superstitious power over men's minds as of some- 
 thing sacred and irreducible. It is quite possible, 
 however, to resolve these prescriptions into simple 
 elements, to trace them to their origin, and hence to 
 free the mind of their irrational tyranny. As a 
 result of such an investigation, he arrives at the con- 
 clusion that the original or primary morality was 
 that of the masters. It was what Plato would call 
 the expediency of the powerful. Whatever was to 
 the interest of the controlling or conquering class
 
 Nietzsche 133 
 
 was approved. They were the makers of values and 
 their might was right. Naturally their own char- 
 acteristics constituted the virtues. Whatever was 
 distinctive of them was denominated good; whatever 
 was distinctive of the lower or subjugated class or 
 caste, as looked down upon by their superiors, was 
 denominated bad {schlecht). From the point of 
 view of these inferiors, however, matters would ap- 
 pear reversed : the attributes of the slaves — pa- 
 tience, gentleness, forbearance, humility, compassion, 
 pacifism — would be regarded as good ; whatever 
 distinguished their superiors as compared with them 
 
 — haughtiness, severity, domination, courage — 
 would be regarded as evil (bose). A comparison of 
 the two sets of terms will illuminate the difference 
 
 — good and bad as contrasted with good and evil. 
 And if it is this latter couple which belongs to our 
 moral vocabulary to-day, it is due to the fact that 
 the noble values, the values of the masters, have been 
 dislodged by the mean and belittling values of the 
 slaves — the manly and vigorous virtues by the 
 weak and degenerate ones. This, according to 
 Nietzsche, is the great servile revolution from which 
 the world is suffering to-day. It is the feeble and 
 cowardly who have succeeded in imposing their 
 standards upon the strong and courageous. Unable 
 to conquer the latter they have taken their revenge 
 by infecting the victors with their own disease until 
 society is utterly rotten and corrupt. This is the 
 first great shift or transvaluation of values, which 
 must be reversed before we can expect to regain 
 our health and strength. 
 
 In this servile revolt there have been four chief
 
 134 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 agents or instrumentalities — Socratism and Plato- 
 nism, Judaism, Christianity, and modern revolution- 
 ism. For the authors of these movements Nietzsche 
 is consistently merciless — Socrates, Plato, Jesus, 
 St. Paul, the French Revolution. They figure be- 
 tween them all that he detested most — rationalism 
 and altruism; that is, falsehood and infirmity. What 
 he can not forgive them is their triumph. As a 
 matter of fact they have transformed morality in 
 in their own sense; they have in a manner proved 
 themselves the stronger. They have shown that they 
 too are a force and that there are other forces than 
 the physical and carnal forces to which Nietzsche 
 confines his attention. They are a standing refuta- 
 tion of his philosophy of the will to power. Hence 
 his exasperation. Christianity and alcoholism he 
 couples as the two worst curses of modern civili- 
 zation. And he means, not the official, the institu- 
 tional, the political Christianity of the churches, 
 but the Christian ethics — righteousness in our 
 sense, a sense which was shared by Socrates and the 
 Jews, and which was taken up and incorporated in 
 the morality of Christianity. What an age of sur- 
 prises the nineteenth century was! Here was 
 Nietzsche belabouring it on the one flank for its 
 pusillanimous addiction to Christianity and Tolstoy 
 scourging it on the other for its impious defection 
 from that same Christianity and the poor old century 
 plodding along between them amid the mingled 
 cheers and jeers of the bystanders. 
 
 Since the current morality — to continue our pur- 
 suit of Nietzsche — is a slave morality, a morality 
 calculated for the comfort and security of weakness,
 
 Nietzsche 135 
 
 not for the stimulation and encouragement of 
 strength, a morality which is virtually a denial of 
 the vital principle, the will to power — in view of 
 these conclusions it will never be well with the world 
 until a readjustment has been made. For the ad- 
 vantage of the race there is needed a rectification — 
 or in Nietzsche's own words, a transvaluation — of 
 values. It is in this sense that he calls himself an 
 " immoralist," not that he has no discipline to 
 recommend but that he denies the validity of what 
 passes for morality nowadays. This morality may 
 be all very well for the lower classes, for the " cattle- 
 men," who need a " cattle-morality," for the Vielzu- 
 viele and the Ueberfliissige. But before life can 
 attain its fulness, before life can " surpass itself," 
 there must be a counter-revolution in favour of the 
 strong and masterful. 
 
 It is at this point that Niezsche's work of con- 
 struction actually begins — with the introduction of 
 the superman. The superman may be defined in 
 a general way as the consummation of humanity. It 
 is not a new type or species produced by the process 
 of evolution — with respect to evolution as such 
 Nietzsche has his reserves; the superman is, in 
 Nietzschean phraseology, an instance of life surpass- 
 ing itself. In other words, he is a being who lives 
 successfully in accordance with the will to power. 
 Since society is justified, not by its average, 
 but by its exceptions, he is the acme of society 
 properly understood. He is the glorification of con- 
 quest, who in order to triumph over others, has 
 learned to triumph over himself. He has learned 
 to say " yes " to life, to will it with all its pains and
 
 136 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 horrors. For since it is but weakness to revolt or 
 strive against a fate greater than oneself, the super- 
 man must school himself to will with fate. Amor 
 jati! Then what is, is in accordance with his will 
 too. He must will even the everlasting recurrence 
 — in Nietzsche's opinion the most sublime of human 
 conceptions, at once the most awful and the most 
 consoling of truths and the most searching test of 
 the superman's superiority. 
 
 Like most of Nietzche's dogmas the everlasting 
 recurrence is nothing new. It is to be found in 
 antiquity — most modern ideas are; but what is 
 more singular, it was put forward by two French- 
 men at about the same time with Nietzsche — a 
 certain Blanqui and the well known Dr. Le Bon. 
 Stated in so many words it sounds almost puerile. 
 For this reason I had better translate Nietzsche's 
 version of it: 
 
 " The world of forces suffers no diminution; for other- 
 wise it had grown weak in the course of infinity, 
 and perished. The world of forces suffers no pause; 
 or otherwise the period had been reached and the clock 
 of being were still. The world of forces never attains an 
 equilibrium; it has never a moment of rest, its power 
 and its movement are equally great at every time. What- 
 ever condition the world can reach it must have reached, 
 and not once but often. So of this instant; it was there 
 once already and many times, and will recur again; 
 and so with the instant which bore this and with that 
 which is the child of the present. Man! Thy whole life 
 is ever and again reversed like an hourglass and 
 ever and again runs out — a great moment of time 
 between, until all the conditions out of which thou hast
 
 Nietzsche 137 
 
 come return again in the circuit of the world. And then 
 thou shall find again every grief and every joy and every 
 friend and every foe and every hope and every error 
 and every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine — 
 the whole concatenation of all things. This ring in which 
 thou art a portion gleams ever again. And in every 
 ring of human life in general there is always an hour 
 when first to one, then to many, then to all the mightiest 
 thought appears, that of the everlasting return of all 
 things — that is always for humanity the hour of 
 midday." 
 
 Alone in the Engadine when this stupendous rev- 
 elation struck him, Nietzsche says, he was almost 
 prostrated by the insupportable horror of the 
 thought. It is characteristic of his scientific naivete 
 that he should have attached any importance to such 
 a notion. As a matter of fact, however, he makes 
 it the crucial test of his man of power — the latter's 
 ability to bear this vision of disheartening repetition 
 and to will this too with the rest of life — yes, even 
 to rejoice in it. Indeed, it is just this ordinance of 
 fate which makes the superman necessary — for 
 Nietzsche is not always guiltless of using his con- 
 clusions to prove his premises — the superman 
 alone is capable of bearing up against it, only the 
 superman can live and flourish under such a dispen- 
 sation. 
 
 Such, then, is the superman in silhouette. He is 
 the victor (the Sieger) and hence the maker of 
 values. He is the affirmer (the Ja-sagende) and 
 hence the giver to humanity of significance and 
 direction. The inconsistency of imparting direction
 
 138 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 to that which is ordained to a circular revolution or 
 of significance to that which has no aim or goal 
 seems never to have occurred to Nietzsche. But then 
 it would be only too easy to pick out contradictions 
 among his scattered and unassembled statements. 
 Nietzsche does not reason, he apprehends; he does 
 not prove, he affirms. I have already spoken of that 
 characteristic of his mind which seems to me to 
 serve as a handy expression for most of his peculiar- 
 ities — its susceptibility to polarization; and the 
 same expression will apply as well here to that repul- 
 sion from his own being which resulted in the type 
 of the superman as embodied in Zarathustra. And 
 to those who are satiated with the present cult of 
 futility, the glorification of the amiable, good- 
 natured weakling, the protest as such ought not to 
 be wholly antipathetic. 
 
 It should not be supposed, however, that the 
 superman of whom Nietzsche dreamed is a 
 creature of unbridled passions and uncurbed im- 
 pulses. For the perfection of such a human being, 
 when once bred, there is requisite a long and ardu- 
 ous discipline. He is not a force qui va like Victor 
 Hugo's heroes. Nietzsche, unscientific as he was 
 in the sense of any particular branch of science, had 
 not lived in a scientific age wholly for nothing. His 
 ideal is the old ideal of violence, to be sure; but it 
 has been modified by the physical and biological 
 ideas of the time. The difference between his 
 notion and Victor Hugo's is measured by the change 
 which the conception of " nature " and " natural " 
 has undergone in the interval. His ideal is still that
 
 Nietzsche 139 
 
 of the " natural " man as was Rousseau's, the man 
 without a higher law or will than his own — though 
 what concessions he has to make to secure the su- 
 premacy of that will in schooling himself to will 
 what is, I have already pointed out; but that in 
 itself is a kind of discipline undreamed of by Rous- 
 seau. It might seem, indeed, as though Nietzsche 
 surrendered the whole point here — and it must be 
 confessed that it is harder to reconcile his construc- 
 tive than his destructive inconsistencies; but if he 
 does yield anything, he is quite unconscious of doing 
 so. To this Rousseauist conception of the " natural " 
 man, the man of force or violence or impulse of 
 1830 or thereabouts, he has added the idea of " effi- 
 ciency," a later and " scientific " idea. In a word, 
 Nietzsche's whole thought might be described as the 
 marriage of the romanticism and the scientificism — 
 if I may be allowed the word — or the inhumanism 
 of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, his idea 
 of power may be defined as force plus " efficiency." 
 To the early romanticists " efficiency " was a small 
 matter — in fact, an " efficient " hero would hardly 
 have been a romantic one. To the scientific roman- 
 ticists, the physical and biological romanticists in 
 general and Nietzsche in particular it is everything. 
 And perhaps it is in this manner that he would 
 justify the amor jati. In any case, discipline is 
 necessary to this end; there is no power, no con- 
 quest without it. His training may be summed up 
 in a precept from the superman's bible, Zarathustra: 
 " Be hard." Let the slaves and the underlings 
 retain the soft and emasculate morality of Chris-
 
 140 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tianity and humanitarianism, the superman must be 
 hard, not only to others but to himself — harder, 
 indeed, to himself than others. These, perhaps, are 
 the two most comprehensive commandments for the 
 superman: " Be hard " and " Live dangerously."
 
 THE IDEA OF GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 'Eyco he rkxvrjv ou KaXco 6 av 77 aKoyov irpay^a. 
 
 GORGIAS 
 
 IT IS not infrequently objected to the practice of 
 generalizing on literary topics that it tends to 
 transform what is properly a creature of flesh and 
 blood into a lifeless, if symmetrical, figure of ab- 
 straction. In some respects the charge is just. To 
 suppose that Sophocles wrote the Antigone in con- 
 scious illustration of a dramatic formula, would be 
 totally to mistake the process of literary creation. 
 He wrote it because he liked the subject and found 
 it suggestive: as we say nowadays, he saw some- 
 thing in it. But even in this case it is perfectly 
 legitimate to analyse and define the kind of thing 
 that appealed to him and the kind of thing that 
 he succeeded in making out of it as far as his 
 impressions and methods are uniform. In other 
 words, it is possible to determine the character of his 
 work as a whole even at the risk of neglecting the 
 specific play of feature and circumstance which 
 lends every individual performance its own peculiar 
 vivacity. And the same sort of treatment is equally 
 feasible with the body of Greek tragedy — or for 
 that matter, with tragedy considered as a universal 
 genre. 
 
 And further, even though the Greeks, like other 
 tragedians, worked freely, according to their own 
 
 141
 
 142 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 genius, in the stuff that pleased them, without ref- 
 erence to rule or prescription; even so, it is none the 
 less certain that they proceeded in accordance with 
 certain general ideas and habits of thought. At all 
 events, in order to understand what they have done, 
 we should naturally have to take it up in some gen- 
 eral expression, which at most would represent, not 
 necessarily their manner of creating it or our manner 
 of enjoying it, but merely our manner of disposing 
 of it. No one pretends, I suppose, that the physical 
 or mechanical principles which help us to make 
 sense of the rainbow, offer any adequate equivalent 
 for our joy in it, or even that it was ever made in 
 deliberate demonstration of such principles. And 
 while I should hardly care to institute a comparison 
 between scientific and critical generalization, there 
 is sufficient analogy between the two cases to illus- 
 trate the fact that as the sole condition of dealing 
 intelligently with a number of details, we are obliged 
 to gather them into our minds in a broad and system- 
 atic way. And while, again, I would not be so rash 
 as to say that any dramatist ever harboured any 
 such views as I am about to utter concerning Greek 
 drama; yet I do believe that some such conception 
 — if not mine, then that of another more happy — 
 is involved in that drama and is a fair expression 
 of the manner in which it arranges itself, when it 
 does arrange itself, in our heads. For after all it 
 is necessary to remember that the creation of a play 
 and its comprehension are two very different things. 
 On the other hand, I am as far from pretending 
 to say anything novel as I am from expressing the 
 the visions and raptures of genius. Not only has
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 143 
 
 Aristotle occupied this ground before me; but he 
 has in some sense told the whole story once for all. 
 Not that every just remark, which has since been 
 made on the subject, derives directly from Aristotle. 
 But while it would appear ridiculous to father all 
 subsequent ideas upon him, yet it is true that 
 whatever is justly said in this matter does array 
 itself naturally under his authority, almost as an ex- 
 planation or extension of his teaching. If I can only 
 classify the facts, therefore, from a single point of 
 view so that they will all hang together and take 
 on that air of intellectual consistency which results 
 from the possibility of considering a number of 
 particulars in one light and under one angle, I 
 shall think my purpose satisfactorily accomplished. 
 The aim of criticism must always consist, in the 
 first instance, in making its subject intelligible by 
 reducing it to a single set of relationships. 
 
 Like every other work of literature a tragedy is 
 the product of two factors. There is, first, the crude 
 stuff or substance, fact or invention — the " myth " 
 or " fable," as it used to be called, the " story," 
 as it is called nowadays — which serves as the found- 
 ation of the action; and second, the handling or 
 treatment, the " art," which gives this raw material 
 its literary value. It is only by a kind of license 
 that we can speak of an event, whether real or 
 imaginary, as a tragedy. In such a case we are 
 merely availing ourselves of a handy theatrical
 
 144 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 figure. Literally, we are justified in saying at most 
 that such an occurrence might possibly yield a trag- 
 edy if properly worked up and presented. Even 
 in the common manner of speaking the force of 
 the figure depends on a recognition of the necessity 
 of dramatic elaboration for genuinely tragic effect. 
 In other words, a tragedy is not a work of nature but 
 of art. 
 
 Like the treatment, however, the myth or story 
 itself, upon which the tragedy is founded, should 
 have a special character of its own. It is probably 
 a vague recognition of the circumstance that every 
 transaction indifferently is not proper material for 
 tragic handling, which confines the popular appli- 
 cation of the term to certain occurrences in real 
 life, however capricious and inexact this application 
 of the word is likely to be. In short, tragedy is not 
 wholly an affair of manner any more than it is 
 wholly an affair of matter. The substance must 
 be suitable; and it can be so only when it is of a sort 
 to violate our feeling of moral congruity or fitness. 
 That is to say, the tragic story or fable should in- 
 volve a discrepancy between our sense of fact, as 
 illustrated in the incidents of the action, on the one 
 hand, and on the other, our conception of justice 
 and right reason. And it is just this disheartening 
 consciousness of inconsistency, implicit in the per- 
 ception of the dramatic data, as between our knowl- 
 edge of things as they are or seem to be and our 
 vision of them as they should be, which it is one of 
 the duties of the tragic dramatist to reinforce and 
 deepen by his treatment. 
 
 At first sight it may seem something of a paradox
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 145 
 
 to rest tragedy upon the same general basis, the 
 appreciation of incongruity, as that upon which it 
 has become usual to rest comedy. And yet it has 
 been observed again and again that as far as the 
 mere dramatic substratum is concerned, there is no 
 essential difference between tragedy and comedy: 
 the same premises may serve for either according 
 to circumstances. As Vinet, for one, has pointed 
 out, the subject of Mithridate is identical with that 
 of L'Avare — the fifth scene of the third act in the 
 former play utilizing exactly the same situation as 
 the third scene of the fourth act in the latter; while 
 between Mahomet and Tartuffc, and Andromaque 
 and Ricochets, to mention only obvious instances, 
 there is an unmistakable likeness of the same kind. 
 And yet how different the effect! The truth is, 
 incongruity may stir very different emotions under 
 different circumstances. 
 
 In the case of comedy it is the sense of decorum 
 and convention, rather than any graver feeling, 
 which is offended. A violation of the proprieties, 
 an inconsistency of character, a contrariety of cir- 
 cumstances — of such is the fabric of comedy. In 
 spite of its tragic possibilities Le Misanthrope 
 arouses, as a matter of fact, no profound distrust, it 
 stirs no serious misgivings. That a prig of Alceste's 
 stamp should so far belie his professions as to fall 
 in love with a trifling flirt like Celemene, arouses, 
 much the same feeling, under Moliere's management, 
 as that a man in irreproachable evening clothes, to 
 borrow an example from Professor Sully, should 
 slip and fall into the mud. To the intelligent ob- 
 server the one experience is, of course, much more
 
 146 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 interesting than the other. The latter is wholly 
 superficial and fortuitous. The former is rooted in 
 human nature and furnishes a better pasturage for 
 that sort of intellectual curiosity and amusement 
 which it is the business of the comic poet to elicit 
 from his themes as it is the business of the tragic 
 poet to elicit from his the motifs proper to his own 
 genre. 
 
 In the case of tragedy, on the contrary, the incon- 
 gruity is such as to shock profoundly the moral pre- 
 possessions of the race — to shake, if not to unsettle, 
 confidence in the moral order, in the moral reality 
 of the universe. The sacrifice of a girl so innocent 
 and ingenuous as Iphigenia to the indirections of her 
 father's ambitious policy or that of a woman so 
 elevated and disinterested as Antigone to state's 
 reason and municipal convenience, is in itself a 
 direct attack upon the observer's faith in a supreme 
 equity, in a just apportionment of human lots. Nor 
 is it otherwise with Mithridate as compared with 
 L'Avare. The spectacle of a ravenously avaricious 
 character like Harpagon in the throes of a passion 
 so extravagant as love, presents an extremely curious 
 and amusing case of ethical casuistry — nothing 
 more; while the exposure of Monime in her maiden 
 decorum to the jealous inquisition of her tigerish 
 master is enough to confound belief in the equit- 
 able regulation of mortal affairs. 
 
 It is this sort of thing that I should like to call 
 the tragic qualm — this feeling of insecurity and 
 confusion, as it were a sort of moral dizziness and 
 nausea, due to the vivid realization, in the dramatic 
 fable, of a suspicion which is always lurking un-
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 147 
 
 comfortably near the threshold of consciousness, 
 that the world is somehow out of plumb. Herein 
 lies the genuine " clash " of tragedy, as it has been 
 called — not in a mere collision of persons or inter- 
 ests or even of ideas within the confines of the play 
 itself, but rather in the contradiction life is perpetu- 
 ally opposing to our human values and standards. 
 
 To be sure, our sensibility for this sort of thing 
 is rather blunt at present. This is not a tragic age. 
 Nor is it essentially a moral one. But for all that 
 there are times when the tragic qualm, inherent 
 as it is in the nature of things rather than of art, 
 obtrudes itself irresistibly. The wanton assassina- 
 tion of the most inoffensive of our presidents is a 
 case in point — as is the senseless obliteration of 
 an entire population by earthquake, volcanic up- 
 heaval, or other cataclysm. I grant that even these 
 tremendous catastrophes are beginning to lose their 
 terrors for the popular imagination in the rapid 
 extension of a civilization preponderantly material. 
 But at the same time, though such matters are not 
 of themselves proper for tragedy for a reason that 
 I shall assign in a few minutes, yet they do still stir 
 in thoughtful natures the kind of feeling peculiar 
 to the tragic fact as such; they raise again the hor- 
 rifying old distrust of nature and her dealings with 
 her creature. Like every lapse of reason, like every 
 intrusion or irruption of the irrational or the unin- 
 telligible into the sphere of human interests, they 
 threaten again the security of man's dearest illu- 
 sions, they trouble his spirit and fill him with name- 
 less apprehensions for the sanity and good faith of 
 that order in which humanity with its quivering
 
 148 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 and importunate conscience is helplessly and irre- 
 vocably involved. For after all the tragic qualm is 
 perhaps nothing more or less than a sudden and 
 appalling recognition of our desperate plight in a 
 universe apparently indiscriminate of good and evil 
 as of happiness and misery. 
 
 Without the tragic qualm, then, in the dramatic 
 data there is no tragedy. But this is not enough; 
 it is but preliminary — in Plato's words, tcl irpd 
 rpaycodlas. It is necessary that the qualm should 
 be allayed, that the quarrel between the certainties 
 of experience and the exactions of conscience should 
 be composed, and that confidence should be restored. 
 In addition to making sure of the emotions proper 
 to his stuff in itself, the poet must also manage in 
 such a way as to answer the question mutely pro- 
 pounded by his fable: if such things can be, what 
 becomes of the law of eternal righteousness as given 
 in the heart of man? Such is the question which the 
 drama, as " the imitation of an action," forces re- 
 lentlessly upon the attention of the audience. And 
 the whole function of tragedy, as a literary genre, 
 is to resolve this doubt, in one way or another, 
 through the medium of the action but of the action 
 as a dramatic, not as an actual, performance. Other- 
 wise, there is no art — nothing but a dull dead stere- 
 otype of reality with all its contradictions, incoher- 
 ences, and inconsequences — and with all its 
 resultant incredibility. Senseless assassination or 
 aimless annihilation may indeed present a problem, 
 but the problem is insoluble. And where there is 
 no solution, either by fault of the circumstances or 
 by fault of the poet, there is no genuine tragedy.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 149 
 
 If I may venture for a little while into the thicket 
 of critical exegesis, this or something very like it 
 seems to me to be what Aristotle had in mind in 
 speaking of the " purgation of the passions " as the 
 end of tragic poetry. The eventual relaxation of 
 the emotions of pity and horror, which were char- 
 acteristic of the tragic qualm as it affected the sensi- 
 bilities of the Greek by reason of certain conditions 
 which I shall have the temerity to discuss before 
 long — the eventual relaxation and alleviation of 
 these emotions by some adjustment or other, after 
 their violent excitation by the representation of the 
 action, appears to satisfy the Aristotelian definition 
 of tragedy, as 5i' eKeov kglI cf)6(3ov irepalvovaa rr}v 
 r&v TOiovTOiv Tradrj/jLCLTOiv Kadapacv as accomplish- 
 ing through pity and horror the purgation of these 
 selfsame passions. But in any case — and this is the 
 point after all — what is indisputable is the sharp 
 distinction drawn by the Poetics between the myth 
 and its handling, between the action as an imitation 
 and an initiation — or in other words, between life 
 and literature. And in the light of the distinction 
 it can hardly be denied that Aristotle regarded as in- 
 dispensable some such final accommodation as I have 
 tried to indicate. Without some such reconciliation 
 of experience with conscience, without some adjust- 
 ment of the course of events to the principles of 
 human nature he could not have conceived of a trag- 
 edy in the proper sense. 
 
 It is through this solution, as I have called it 
 in customary fashion, that tragedy acquires its sig- 
 nificance, as it acquires its poignant sense of reality 
 through its presentation of the tragic problem im-
 
 150 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 plicit in its imitation of an action. While it is by the 
 latter avenue that life enters tragedy, ideas enter 
 it through the former. In this manner verisimilitude 
 on the one part and moral consistency on the other 
 become necessary attributes of the tragic poem. 
 But even in the first case, in the case of the fable 
 itself, it is as much the dramatist's vision which is 
 involved as his observation. The success of his 
 action, even as imitation, depends mainly upon his 
 eye for the problem. What affects the audience is 
 his fidelity, not so much to a certain order of phe- 
 nomena, as to a certain order of emotions. In a 
 word, the verisimilitude of his drama, and hence its 
 reality, is measured, in the last resort, not by the 
 exactitude with which he is seen to reproduce the 
 spectators' own sensations, but by the justice with 
 which he is felt to have voiced the tragic qualm. 
 
 11 
 
 Of the technical elements of tragedy in general I 
 have said nothing. I am concerned with what may 
 be called its intellectual bases alone. I have assumed 
 the dramatic genre with all its appurtenances and 
 and properties. And I have taken for granted as 
 sufficiently obvious of itself that the rational prem- 
 ises of tragedy are expressed and to a certain extent 
 conceived in terms of sensation and emotion. The 
 kind of story in which the problem is sensibly em- 
 bodied and through which the tragic qualm is emo- 
 tionally communicated, together with the manner 
 of treatment whereby the solution is intimated, will
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 151 
 
 depend upon the character of the drama and its 
 inspiration. Naturally, too, the specific feelings to 
 which the tragic qualm is determined, will vary with 
 the dramatist's sense of the tragic problem — as will 
 the pacification with his convictions religious or 
 otherwise — as these may be affected by his natural 
 disposition and the civilization in which he finds 
 himself. If the tragic problem of Shakespeare and 
 the Elizabethans is compared with that of Sophocles 
 and the Athenians, it will be found to arise from 
 quite another notion of the fatal incongruities of life 
 and to be differently constituted with respect to its 
 emotional notes, while the solutions tacitly proposed 
 by the two dramas will naturally diverge to an equal 
 extent. 
 
 With Shakespeare the tragic dissonance or 
 " clash " would seem to engage as between man's 
 possibilities or pretensions and his fate. The incom- 
 patibility of his desires and aspirations, which are 
 illimitable, with the conditions which actually dis- 
 pose of him — mean, trivial, absurd, belittling as 
 they may be, but always at odds with his higher 
 nature and impulses and frequently ruinous of his 
 life and happiness — something like this would ap- 
 pear to be what moved Shakespeare most in his 
 graver moods. The contrast between what humanity 
 might or should be and what as a matter of fact it 
 may become by the accidents of existence — herein 
 lies the discord at the root of his tragedy. A being 
 of inexhaustible capacity, noble in reason, infinite 
 in faculty, godlike in apprehension, reduced to a 
 mere quintessence of dust — a Hamlet whose world 
 is out of point or an Othello " fall'n in the practice
 
 152 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of a damned slave," such is the Shakespearean pro- 
 tagonist. 
 
 " This man so great that all that is, is his, 
 Oh, what a trifle and poor thing he is! " 
 
 In short, Shakespeare's tragedy, like romantic 
 tragedy in general, is a tragedy of circumstances; 
 hence the " low " and " comic " elements with which 
 pseudo-classicism used to reproach it. To regard 
 a business like the graveyard scene in Hamlet as a 
 side-issue or a sop to the groundlings, as apologetic 
 criticism was once fond of doing, is to miss the point. 
 There may be some excuse for disliking it when done, 
 but Shakespeare knew what he was about when he 
 did it. In its violent affront to the ideal dignity of 
 Hamlet's situation at the moment when he is totter- 
 ing precariously on the edge of his own grave as of 
 Ophelia's, in its fantastic contradiction of the Ham- 
 let of abstraction by the Hamlet of fatuity it is 
 of the very essence of Shakespearean tragedy. 
 The objection that such a scene is out of 
 keeping with the seriousness of the emergency 
 is true enough; but it is equally pointless, for the 
 tragedy consists in just this affront to human dig- 
 nity, this outrage to the sacredness of the individual. 
 That such an objection should ever have been made, 
 argues a gross misunderstanding, not only of the 
 manner in which he conceived the tragic problem, 
 but also of the nature of his tragic irony, so different 
 from Sophocles'. " That is the glory of Shakes- 
 peare," Tennyson is reported to have said, " that he 
 can give you the incongruity of things." Even about
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 153 
 
 his comic characters in their more sober aspects 
 hangs the atmosphere of fortuitous calamity. It is 
 what gives Falstaff his grip upon our sympathies; 
 he ought, it seems, to be so much nobler than he is. 
 For Shakespeare's mixture of comic and tragic is 
 not confined to a mere intermingling of scenes of one 
 sort with those of another; it resides in a kind of 
 duplicity of conception, which is, perhaps, humour- 
 ous rather than comic. Just as the lighter characters 
 like Falstaff may catch a reflection of pathos from 
 being in some manner the victims of untoward cir- 
 cumstances, so his tragic characters too may be 
 slightly ridiculous for the same reason, like Othello 
 gulping Iago's innuendoes or Macbeth gaping at the 
 witches. At all events, from the nature of the case 
 his tragic heroes, for all their wilfulness and violence, 
 are always a little pitiable as well as pathetic, like 
 poor old Lear. About them all is a little something 
 of Coleridge — one reason, perhaps, that he is able 
 to speak of them with so much intelligence and 
 sympathy. Such is, no doubt, the unavoidable 
 weakness of a drama in which fatality has been 
 displaced by necessity. If there is a principle pre- 
 siding over the course of Shakespeare's action it is 
 the law of causation, in accordance with which the 
 quarry is finally run down by a pack of conse- 
 quences, more or less incidental, with whose incep- 
 tion his own character has little or nothing to do, 
 however it may appear, as the only constant and 
 predicable element, to determine the outcome, very 
 much as the duration of the hunt might be said, 
 regardless of the hounds, to depend upon the endur- 
 ance and cunning of the fox. After all the problem
 
 154 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 set by Shakespeare is simply how a man of such and 
 such possibilities could go to the ground. The an- 
 swer consists in tracing the circumstantial conspir- 
 acy, the causal succession by which he has been 
 brought to such a pass, together with its effect upon 
 his character. Transfer Hamlet and Othello, and 
 the tragedy becomes unthinkable. How long would 
 it have taken the former to unmask Iago or the latter 
 to settle with Claudius? 
 
 Hence the curious result, as compared with the 
 Greek, that whatever their fortunes, Shakespeare's 
 protagonists are morally accountable only for their 
 intentions. It is impossible, of course, to deny that 
 Hamlet pays the penalty of his acts, such as they 
 are, in the sense that he endures the event; but he 
 is in no wise answerable to the audience for the pre- 
 dicament in which he finds himself, as is, for 
 example, the Hippolytus of Euripides. On the con- 
 trary, not only does Macbeth suffer the consequences 
 of his conduct, he participates in their odium as 
 well, on the strength of the malevolence of his 
 motives. The latter is adjudged a criminal, the 
 former is not. At the same time, there is a striking 
 want of concurrence between verdict and sentence. 
 Inoffensive as he is, Hamlet comes off no better than 
 Macbeth. The tragedy is the same in both cases — 
 the ruin of a promising career. In the one instance 
 justice is felt to have been done; in the other not. 
 Why, then, the identical issue? In short, for the 
 tragic problem implicit in his representation of life 
 Shakespeare has no moral solution. He seems to 
 say: Such is the way of the world; to be sure, it 
 offends your sense of fitness that humanity should
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 155 
 
 be liable to these wretched contingencies, but what 
 would you have? Life 
 
 " is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing." 
 
 In default of a final impression of moral consistency 
 as between the hero's deserts and his apportionment, 
 the consternation of the spectators is composed by 
 a feeling which is left with them of the sympathetic 
 superiority of the victim over the forces to which 
 he succumbs. In spite of his insufficiency it is 
 impossible not to rate Hamlet or Lear above the 
 whole conspiracy to which he falls a victim. In 
 this way the tragic qualm, as I have called it, is 
 allayed after a fashion; the audience is reconciled 
 to the catastrophe — otherwise there would be no 
 tragic effect at all. Such a conclusion, however, is 
 purely sentimental and lenitive; there is no reas- 
 sertion of the moral order, no catharsis of the 
 passions to which the qualm is due. It is not by his 
 solution, to speak exactly, that Shakespeare is great. 
 Perhaps the kind of incongruity on which he based 
 his drama is incapable of moral reconciliation. At 
 all events, it is, as a matter of fact, to the terrific 
 vividness with which he pictures the plight of 
 humanity in a world of unscrupulous eventualities 
 and draws its consequences for the character of the 
 individual that his greatness is due. Hence the in- 
 dividuality of his drama and its title to the common 
 designation, tragedy of character. 
 
 Such, as I conceive the matter, are the funda-
 
 156 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 mental ideas of Shakespearean tragedy, which is in 
 most respects a fair type of romantic tragedy in 
 general. By comparison, the problem of Greek trag- 
 edy has to do with the effect of an action, as such, 
 in promoting human happiness or misery; while 
 the solution seeks to justify the issue by attaching 
 to the action concerned a corresponding moral qual- 
 ity of good or evil. It is not a concern for happiness 
 in itself which differentiates the Greek tragedy from 
 the Shakespearean; on the whole, it is rather a con- 
 cern for the correlation of happiness and righteous- 
 ness. But as far as the representation itself goes, 
 all tragedy, as a matter of fact, is alike eudsemonistic 
 in referring immediately to the instinct of happiness 
 as sole umpire of the denouement or metabasis. If 
 life were suddenly to be conceived as a discipline 
 of suffering, a school of character alone, without 
 reference to the welfare of the individual, our trag- 
 edy would have to be recast. I do not see how 
 Lear or (Edipus could be regarded, on such a sup- 
 position, as a tragic figure. Indeed, in the (Edipus 
 Coloneus, where Sophocles has taken this view to 
 some extent and has modified the postulates of trag- 
 edy in some measure to suit it, the impression 
 produced is not wholly a tragic one. The shock to 
 the sensibilities upon which depends the effect of 
 the action in tragedy, as distinguished from that of 
 its resolution, consists capitally in seeing humanity 
 fail, by some outrageous contretemps or other, of 
 the well being to which it instinctively thinks itself 
 entitled. And the peculiar feeling or quality of 
 feeling which makes the qualm of one tragedy differ 
 from that of another is due, not to a care or a neglect
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 157 
 
 of such a natural expectation, but to the particular 
 manner in which it is raised to be disappointed — 
 that is, finally to the character of the two parties to 
 the collision, that which serves to raise the hope 
 or expectation and that which serves to disap- 
 point it. 
 
 Now in Shakespeare this collision or clash was 
 seen to grow out of an inconsistency between the 
 fairness of human promise or appearance and the 
 dubiousness of mortal performance — or in terms 
 of feeling, between the expectations raised by the 
 hero's personality and the disappointment caused 
 by his subsequent career. In Greek tragedy, on the 
 other hand, preoccupied as it is with the ends of 
 action and its relation to prosperity, the collision 
 originates in a discrepancy between the hero's con- 
 duct and its consequences — between the favourable 
 expectations raised by his action and the deplorable 
 results that actually ensue from it, as when an act 
 calculated to ensure success is in reality productive 
 of calamity But of the probable outcome of an 
 act there is morally only one prognostic — the 
 intention or purpose of its author. Acts of which 
 happiness may consistently be predicted, whose 
 termination ought to be prosperous, are those whose 
 intentions are good — or at least innocent. When 
 such an act, deserving in itself of approval, turns 
 out disastrously, like Antigone's celebration of her 
 brother's funeral rites, there is bound to follow a 
 strong feeling of amazement and dismay. The 
 conscience is deeply shocked; and there arises that 
 peculiar sense of vertiginous insecurity which I have 
 called for convenience the tragic qualm.
 
 158 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 In this connection it is worthy of remark that in 
 Greek you are always pretty sure what the protag- 
 onist is going to do. He seldom or never dis- 
 appoints you; whereas in Shakespeare the protag- 
 onist's behaviour is always more or less doubtful 
 until it is settled forever by the inertia of the action. 
 That Orestes will kill his mother, is certain from the 
 first; he has come to do so and do so he will — he 
 acts consistently in the spirit of his intention: what 
 is uncertain is the consequence of his doing so. 
 Whether Hamlet will kill the king or not, is always 
 pretty much a matter of conjecture before he has 
 done so. In fact that is just the question. In the 
 one case it is Hamlet's character which is on trial; 
 in the other it is Orestes' act. 
 
 From this shift of dramatic emphasis has resulted 
 a difference in the treatment of character which is 
 no less significant of the romantic tragedy as com- 
 pared with the Greek. While the Greek protagonist 
 is calculated solely with reference to the action, 
 whose moral character is reflected upon him; the 
 Shakespearean has developed a character of his own 
 which is partly implicated in the action but is also 
 partly independent of it and uncommitted to it. The 
 former is an agency, not an end in himself. It is 
 not he to whom the action is indebted for its main 
 interest and its peculiar effects, but contrariwise. 
 In consequence, he exists only in and for the play; 
 or what amounts to the same thing, there is no more 
 of him than is necessary to motive the drama, 
 with which he is virtually coterminous. On this 
 account he has simplicity, breadth, and integrity — 
 he possesses a general, abstract, and typical value
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 159 
 
 — to which his modern rival can make no preten- 
 sion. He represents the fates and liabilities of 
 human life rather than the varieties and variations 
 of human nature. 
 
 The Shakespearean character, on the other hand, 
 as a personality more or less inviolable and senti- 
 mentally superior to the mere circumstances of his 
 lot, appears to live with a larger life than that of the 
 action, with which his character is only partially 
 identified. Whoever dreams of measuring Hamlet 
 or Othello or Lear — or even Macbeth for that 
 matter — solely by what he does? Such is the 
 variety, richness, and complexity — such is the eth- 
 ical interest of his character that it is impossible 
 to confound him with his fate, even while one be- 
 wails the pity of it. In retaining his apartness and 
 distinction he preserves a kind of saving grace or 
 eminence in his downfall which makes it dramati- 
 cally endurable. He remains uncompromised be- 
 cause he seems so much more important than the 
 catastrophe, or indeed, than the whole play itself. 
 He stretches away, as it were, indefinitely beyond 
 the boundaries of the drama in which he figures — 
 often meanly enough in comparison with the im- 
 pression of his psychological significance. There 
 is hardly one of all the company who does not occa- 
 sionally let slip some evidence to a trait of character 
 which is not involved in the piece or required by it 
 
 — some hint or reminiscence as though of a previous 
 state of existence. Indeed, so complex is their con- 
 sciousness that it occasionally splits up or divides 
 against itself to the detriment of the dramatic action. 
 It is as much Hamlet's dissension with himself as
 
 160 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 anything else which embarrasses the tragedy. For 
 these reasons it is possible to talk — yes, and to 
 dispute so much about any of Shakespeare's main 
 personages: there appears to be so much more of 
 them than the action is adequate to account for 
 that the remainder, the extra-mural portion, is an 
 inexhaustible subject of speculation and conjecture. 
 Hence the fascination of what may be called the pri- 
 vate character of his dramatis personal, which 
 manifests itself in innumerable odd ways — in biog- 
 raphies of his heroines' girlhood, in discussions of 
 Hamlet's whereabouts and occupations before the 
 curtain went up, even in reference to Lear's and 
 Cordelia's compensations in another world. 
 
 That the stage has gained in a way by this treat- 
 ment of character is undeniable. But what it has 
 gained in one way it has lost in another. Though 
 it has gained in curiousness, in variety, or what 
 we like to call human interest; it has as surely lost 
 in dramatic and literary consistency. That the 
 characters should outgrow the action and cease to 
 be solely the creatures and servants of the drama, 
 is impossible without impairing the accurate ad- 
 justment of parts and functions, the nice application 
 of means to ends upon which depends the perfection 
 of art in general and of dramatic art in particular — 
 without introducing an element of excess or super- 
 fluity, a principle of disorder which tends to warp 
 and sprain the play. The fact is that the Shakes- 
 pearean dramatis personal are too big for the mimic 
 world which they feign to inhabit; they are them- 
 selves realities masquerading in a world of fiction; 
 they belong, not to the stage, but to existence. Dare
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 161 
 
 I say so — they are too natural, particularly the 
 women? I confess that to me at least it seems at 
 times a little incongruous, even a little grotesque to 
 watch these intensely animated characters, complex 
 with all the complexity of life, gesticulating, grim- 
 acing, frowning, smiling, running the gamut of a 
 thousand expressions and inflections, bustling about 
 with all the irresponsible vivacity of nature, " in 
 a fiction, in a dream of passion," amid a factitious 
 and highly artificial scene clapped together trans- 
 parently enough out of a few bits of painted can- 
 vas, a rickety slide or two, and a set of flimsy hang- 
 ings, the whole bounded by an arc of garish 
 footlights and a row of staring spectators. On the 
 contrary, the Greek actor in his buskins, his mask, 
 his robe and trappings, with his restrained gestures 
 and intonations, may seem a singular figure when 
 deprived of his appropriate accompaniments. But 
 put him in his place, in the midst of a scene and an 
 action carefully insulated, to say the least, from 
 actuality; and he ceases to be grotesque or incon- 
 gruous: he and his surroundings are of a sort. 
 
 In one particular, however — in the nature of 
 the actions imitated and in the fidelity of the imita- 
 tion it must be acknowledged that Greek tragedy 
 bears no little likeness to the Elizabethan — quite 
 enough, indeed, to justify the numerous parallels that 
 have been drawn between them and even to support 
 the contention that Shakespeare's is the likest of 
 all tragedy to the Athenian. Nor is the similarity so 
 very extraordinary after all. There is naturally a 
 kind of family resemblance among all the members 
 of a genre. From this particular point of view life
 
 1 62 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 is bound to present pretty much the same aspect 
 whoever views it. The frightful rivalry and compe- 
 tition, the monstrous waste of life, the atrocious ex- 
 pense of suffering, which are the very conditions 
 of existence on the planet — from such sources all 
 tragedy indifferently must draw its materials, which 
 are much more elemental and simple than the com- 
 paratively artificial and complex interests of comedy. 
 But it is true that the Greeks and Shakespeare are 
 alike in looking at these things far more piercingly 
 and nakedly than the poets of any other nation. 
 They see the facts more nearly and distinctly 
 through fewer veils and conventions. And there 
 is, in consequence, a kind of unflinching realism 
 about their representation of the tragic data which 
 carries them a long way in company. Parricide, 
 matricide, suicide, infanticide, rape, incest, insan- 
 ity, sacrilege — these formed the stock in trade of 
 the one as of the other. But such a likeness is 
 more or less superficial, touching the matter rather 
 than the spirit. It is the resolution, the accommoda- 
 tion between experience and conscience, which is 
 vital. And here, it must be acknowledged, the 
 Athenian takes leave of the Elizabethan. While 
 the latter was content to exhibit " the weary weight 
 of all this unintelligible world " with hardly more 
 than a sentimental palliative for its atrocities, the 
 former boldly attacked the problem involved in the 
 frustration of human happiness, and by reconciling 
 the discrepancy at its root, succeeded in allaying 
 the spectators' apprehensions for the miscarriage 
 of justice, at the same time relieving and relaxing 
 the passions excited by such a spectacle in a manner
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 163 
 
 to suggest the Aristotelian metaphor of a moral 
 catharsis. 
 
 Specifically, his problem, as he saw the riddle of 
 the universe reflected in the legendary and heroic 
 mischances with which he worked, was this: why 
 should an act which is performed with virtuous or 
 blameless intent and which is to all appearance good 
 and meritorious in itself, work irreparable mischief 
 for its author, In order to answer this question he 
 undertook to show, or rather to convey the impres- 
 sion, that such an act, whatever its motives, was in 
 reality committed in violation of moral law and that 
 so far from being innocent or even indifferent, it 
 was, as a matter of fact, subversive of order and 
 discipline. In other words, it was not merely in- 
 expedient but wicked and on that account properly 
 liable to disaster; while its perpetrator himself was 
 not merely unlucky or unhandy, but criminal as 
 well and therefore obnoxious to correction and 
 punishment. 
 
 To take Sophocles, the maturest and clearest ex- 
 pression of Greek tragedy, as an example — his 
 whole theatre seems to presuppose some universal 
 and abstract principle of law and order, &gt aypaic- 
 ra Ka(T(l>a\rj Oew vbni/jia presiding over existence -a 
 kind of moral police, to put it crudely — which pro- 
 vided automatically and of itself for the regulation 
 of human affairs and for the execution and removal 
 of disturbers, who, if suffered with impunity, would 
 unsettle the equilibrium of earthly things. Any 
 deed, done in contravention of this principle or law, 
 however innocent might be its motives, was essen- 
 tially criminal, as involving in fact a breach of the
 
 164 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 moral peace. Ignorance itself, like rectitude of in- 
 tention, constituted no defense, though dramatically 
 they both served to recommend the offender to the 
 sympathies of the beholders — in short, to qualify 
 him a tragic character; for otherwise his fate would 
 have no particular interest — it would be a clear 
 case of retribution, raising no doubt and occasion- 
 ing no qualm. As for the remoter mystery between 
 the law and the culprit's conscience — with this 
 Sophocles has little or nothing to do; he is content 
 to leave such matters, as too high for him, between 
 the knees of the gods. Only once, in CEdipus Co- 
 loneus, he attempts something like a vindication 
 of their purposes. But as a general thing, what he 
 is concerned for — and in this particular his pre- 
 occupation is sufficiently unlike ours to make its 
 appreciation difficult — is to demonstrate the moral 
 consistency of life as against a purely casual or me- 
 chanical coincidence and to assign to men's actions 
 specifically human and intelligible values of good 
 and evil in place of the neutral and noncommital 
 attributions of right and wrong to their good or ill 
 success — 
 
 Siv vbjj.0L xpo/ceivrcu 
 v\J/Liro8es, ovpaviav 
 8l' aldkpa Tenvwdevres &v "OXvjxttos 
 irarrip povos, oi'8e viv 
 dvara 0i'cis apepwv 
 
 eTLKTtP, oi'8e p.i]iroTe A&0a KaraKOLpaari, 
 fxeyas h> tovtols deos, oi'8e y^pauKti.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 165 
 
 Nor was this interpretation due to a confusion 
 of nomenclature, as has often been assumed. Soph- 
 ocles was no dupe of a vocabulary. Rather, if 
 there were such a confusion of vocabulary at all, 
 it was a concomitant result, with this interpreta- 
 tion, of the spirit of those who used the language. 
 The conviction of the correlation of misery with 
 wickedness, of prosperity with righteousness, to- 
 gether with what we should call the indifference 
 to motives, which inspired the solution of Greek 
 tragedy, was not confined to Sophocles and his 
 fellow playwrights. It suffused the consciousness 
 of the Greeks. The happy man was the good man; 
 or as we say, for the idea is not without modern 
 echoes, he was the man who had done well. In 
 fact, so thoroughly was the identification ingrained 
 in the popular mind, that there was a general preju- 
 dice against misfortune as in itself an impairment 
 of character. But while the Greek temper was 
 consistently moral, it was consistently intellectual 
 too. Not only were the unhappy obviously wrong; 
 but since no one acted ill knowingly, all wrong doing 
 was finally a form of ignorance or misjudgment — 
 that is, an error of some sort. Ignorance too 
 was criminal. And while this conception of conduct 
 was not pushed relentlessly to its logical conclusion 
 — for Aristotle seems to discriminate in debarring 
 from tragedy what can be only the man of evil im- 
 pulses — yet it did tend to turn the Greek's attention 
 from the motive-grubbing with which we are 
 familiar and fix it upon the act and its consequences, 
 which as a matter of fact furnish the only practical
 
 1 66 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 means of estimating the moral significance of 
 character. 
 
 As a matter of curiosity, suppose we spend a 
 few minutes in pushing Sophocles' conception to 
 its logical conclusion. We must then arrive at some 
 such conception as the following. In case there 
 are acts which tend to violate or do actually violate 
 the moral order, there must be a cosmic will or in- 
 tention, since a moral order implies a corresponding 
 scheme or plan. But what is this moral sense or 
 purpose, this cosmic will? It can not be necessity, 
 for that frequently resists or contravenes the moral 
 order, if actuality is to be taken as the index of ne- 
 cessity. Nor can it be a mere ascription or attribu- 
 tion on the part of our own moral character, for that 
 would have no power to enforce its decrees. Nor can 
 it be identified with the will of Zeus — certainly not 
 the ^Eschylean Zeus, nor even of an educated 
 and properly advised Zeus such as is anticipated 
 in the Prometheus Bound. Is it, then, simply in- 
 herent in the constitution of things? And if so, 
 wholly material after all? For how did the universe 
 get to be a moral affair? And here, I suppose, we 
 reach the term of speculation. The cosmos was to 
 Sophocles a moral cosmos, however it came to be so, 
 just as ours is a mechanical one though we can not 
 explain how or why, and in fact, consider the query 
 impertinent — partly, no doubt, because we can not 
 answer it. The force, however, which insures and 
 sustains this moral order of Sophocles' is fate. In 
 the dramatic economy of the tragedian it is fate 
 which puts the moral order through.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 167 
 
 in 
 
 With these general considerations in mind it is 
 possible to dispose more or less systematically and 
 intelligibly of several details which are usually 
 handled in a rather empirical and disjointed fash- 
 ion as notations of fact rather than as consequences 
 of a principle. 
 
 In the first place, it ought to be clear from this 
 point of view why Greek tragedy should manifest 
 itself so frequently under a sort of typic form which 
 has been described as a conflict of duties. In the 
 light of the recent discussion it is obvious that 
 through some such opposition as this the particular 
 problem with which this tragedy has to do, is at once 
 set out in the strongest possible light and receives 
 the most satisfactory and convincing solution. A 
 protagonist, acting, as in the Antigone, with com- 
 plete faith in the sacredness of his undertaking 
 only to discover in the end that so far from acquit- 
 ting himself of his obligations he has actually in- 
 curred the penalty of an offense as serious to all 
 intents and purposes as the debt which he has 
 endeavoured to meet — such a character affords in 
 his own person the most striking contrast between 
 anticipation and fulfilment and at the same time 
 suggests the most reasonable explanation of his dis- 
 grace. As his motives are the highest conceivable 
 on the one part, so is the tragic anomaly of his fate 
 the most shocking and bewildering; and as his trans- 
 gression is patent and undeniable on the other part, 
 so is the rehabilitation of the moral order equally
 
 1 68 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 certain and reassuring. In such wise the double 
 requirement of Greek tragedy with respect to qualm 
 and catharsis finds complete and ready satisfaction. 
 In this respect nothing could be more striking 
 than the contrast with modern or Shakespearean 
 tragedy. It is almost an unexceptional rule that 
 the Greek protagonist ruins himself in the discharge 
 of what he believes to be a duty — and not always 
 an agreeable one at that; whereas the modern pro- 
 tagonist falls in the indulgence of his own desires. 
 To the one fatality appears in the guise of an obli- 
 gation; to the other in that of a temptation. (Edipus, 
 Antigone, Orestes — it is not so much that they are 
 following their own inclinations — or even what 
 seems to them individually to be right and just, 
 but what the audience too would unanimously recog- 
 nize as such. And it is precisely this — the convic- 
 tion of guilt, brought home to protagonist and 
 audience under such circumstances, which makes 
 the qualm of Greek tragedy. Indeed, I sometimes 
 wonder whether tragedy in the highest sense can 
 exist without such conviction of guilt, notwith- 
 standing that it is, on the contrary, the conviction 
 of innocence in like circumstances which makes the 
 poignancy of modern tragedy. But not to quarrel 
 over degrees and to accept the facts as they are, 
 the difference is real and significant. If the Greek 
 protagonist is tragic by the conviction of guilt, 
 where the modern is tragic by the conviction of 
 innocence, it is that the former is led, by his de-. 
 votion to what he thinks a just obligation or claim 
 against his conscience, to incur the violation of 
 some other engagement equally sacred and binding.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 169 
 
 At the same time, simple as the matter seems 
 when viewed in its proper connection, it is to this 
 very source that much of the misunderstanding of 
 Greek tragedy must be referred. Not infrequently 
 has it happened that one of these obligations or the 
 other has lost its authority for the modern con- 
 science with a resultant falsification of feeling for 
 the situation. In a humanitarian age it is not sur- 
 prising that Prometheus' offense against the celestial 
 ordinance should appear a trifle as compared with 
 his services to mankind and that he himself should 
 have come to be a purely sympathetic and romantic 
 character, such as Shelley has done his best to famil- 
 iarize us with. With a weakening of the ancient 
 civic sense, too, something of the same sort has 
 happened to Antigone. But nevertheless it was 
 originally this strict antinomy of approximately 
 equal duties which afforded Greek tragedy one of 
 the fairest opportunities for the production of its 
 own peculiar effects, not the least notable of which 
 was the characteristic duplicity of feeling it aroused 
 for the protagonist. 
 
 This impression, composed of the two emotions, 
 pity and horror, by which Aristotle defines tragedy 
 — just these two and no others — is to be accounted 
 for in the same way and by the same order of con- 
 siderations as before. Not that Greek tragedy might 
 not produce other emotions too — as a matter of 
 of fact Aristotle himself has arranged for others; 
 but such others are adscititious and incidental. Pity 
 and horror alone are inherent in the idea of the 
 species and essential to its formula. Since the action 
 of the protagonist itself bears a double face or inter-
 
 170 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 pretation, in qualm and catharsis, the emotions of 
 the audience are twofold also. In as far as it is 
 well intended and directed to an end commendable 
 enough in itself, it arouses pity for its devoted 
 author upon whose head it recoils with such fatal 
 effect; while in as far as it is mischievous in fact, 
 as it violates the celestial canon and jeopardizes 
 the established order, it must needs arouse an equal 
 horror for the rash and impious agitator who has 
 ventured to trouble the tranquillity of men and gods. 
 For the blind and passive sufferer of a fate so dis- 
 maying as that required to produce the tragic qualm, 
 pity is the only possible emotion; as is horror for the 
 malefactor convicted of a felony sufficiently mon- 
 strous to justify the judgment which overtakes him 
 and so to work the revulsion of feeling necessary 
 to the catharsis. 
 
 I do not wish to insist upon the moral import 
 of tragedy unduly: I know how reproachful such 
 remarks must seem to my own generation. At the 
 same time I can not leave this topic without a 
 protest. While I do not think that tragedy ought 
 to preach a sermon or read a lesson, it does seem to 
 me that nothing can be more preposterous than 
 the contention that Aristotle, in defining the genre 
 by the emotions of pity and horror, meant to imply 
 that its being is exclusively aesthetic, in the modern 
 acceptation of the term, and devoid entirely of 
 moral purpose or concern. As though pity and 
 horror were necessarily immoral or amoral emo- 
 tions! As though it were not a kind of misnomer 
 to speak of them as aesthetic emotions at all! That 
 there are emotions which are exclusively aesthetic
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 171 
 
 even in the straightened significance now given to 
 the word, I have no doubt. But no one whose judg- 
 ment has not been warped by the perversions of a 
 latter-day criticism would dream of classing pity 
 and horror among them. For what is there so likely 
 to move the latter as the spectacle of blind and in- 
 fatuate iniquity; so likely to move the former as the 
 spectacle of sudden and staggering adversity? The 
 conflict of good and evil, I believe, is still, for all 
 our sophistication, the surest and deepest of all 
 emotional appeals. And in view of the facts I can 
 conceive nothing more impudent than the pre- 
 tension to range Aristotle among the partisans of 
 such a doctrine as I'art pour I'art, because he has 
 formulated tragedy in terms of the very emotions 
 which are most closely identified with our moral 
 perceptions. 
 
 At the same time, pertinent as is his notation of 
 that drama with which he was acquainted, it is a 
 mistake to assume that his definition is true for 
 tragedy in general or romantic tragedy in particular. 
 Since neither problem nor solution is identical, as 
 I have tried to show, it follows that the character- 
 istic sentiment of the latter will be differently con- 
 stituted with respect to its emotional notes. I 
 do not mean to deny that pity and horror are in 
 some sense elicited by every tragedy. They are 
 both present to some extent and in some manner 
 from the very nature of the genre. The apparent 
 moral obliquity of the catastrophe, which is the 
 motive of the qualm — itself, as I have tried to 
 show, a constant factor — is bound to raise a kind 
 of horror, as also a kind of pity for the luckless
 
 172 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 actor. But these feelings are quite different in 
 timbre from the passions to which the Greek play 
 is conditioned by its peculiar interpretation of tragic 
 actuality. They have not the same purity or the 
 same consistency; they are not in a fixed and defi- 
 nite ratio decisive of the character of the drama; 
 they are variable and indeterminate. As a rule, the 
 modern protagonist is either a pathetic character, 
 like Othello, or an antipathetic one, like Macbeth. 
 Otherwise, in default of a solution authoritatively 
 moral, we should be unable to bear his fate, to 
 which we are reconciled, as I have already sug- 
 gested, in the one case by an impression of his senti- 
 mental superiority to his situation, in the other case 
 by a conviction of the poetical justice of his down- 
 fall. The active principle in the first case is sym- 
 pathy; in the second, disapprobation. But sym- 
 pathy is not identical with pity, or disapprobation 
 with horror. And even when our feelings for the 
 modern hero are mixed, these are, on the whole, the 
 sentiments between which we are divided. What 
 pity and horror we feel are caught up and engaged 
 with these more or less loosely. 
 
 For an exhaustive discussion of the subject, how- 
 ever, this is hardly the place. All I wish to do here, 
 is to point out that these two passions, pity and 
 horror, are critical of Greek tragedy alone; and 
 though they may enter into the general description 
 of any tragedy, yet it is misleading to use them as 
 a universal definition of the whole genre without 
 reference to specific versions of the tragic paradox 
 and specific expedients for its accommodation. For 
 as opinion changes with regard to the tragical contin-
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 173 
 
 gencies of life — what they are and how humanity is 
 to be reconciled to their existence; so must the 
 feelings and sentiments voiced by the drama change 
 also, and along with them the attitude toward the 
 tragic character, whose qualifications will obviously 
 be controlled by these very conditions. So it is 
 with the modern protagonist. And it is by the 
 same reasoning that Aristotle's discrimination 
 against certain types as compared with certain 
 others, is to be explained and justified. 
 
 The main difficulty with Aristotle's doctrine of 
 characters seems due to the fact that it makes no 
 provision for the prevailing pathetic or prevailing 
 antipathetic protagonist of later tragedy — in par- 
 ticular, and the saying has been thought a hard one, 
 it disqualifies Macbeth and Richard III. But the 
 fact is that such a type is not Greek; it does not 
 conform to the double role for which the Greek 
 protagonist was cast. While it is possible, of course, 
 to rationalize the ruin of a thorough-paced villain 
 by the law which he has violated, yet his downfall 
 causes no dismay and inflicts no pang; it is just what 
 ought to happen. Hence it offers no moral problem; 
 in the eyes of the Greek there was nothing tragic 
 about it. It might be calamitous for the villain; 
 but objectively, for the audience it was a source of 
 unalloyed satisfaction, just as his career was an 
 occasion of unmigitated disgust. On the other 
 hand, the virtuous or pathetic character is unfitted 
 to the part for a contrary reason. While the sight 
 of such a person suffering an untoward fate, may 
 indeed appear sufficiently enigmatical to trouble 
 the spectator and awaken his suspicions, yet the
 
 174 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 very nature of the case precludes the possibility of 
 a moral settlement. In the adversity of the just 
 there is neither reason nor consistency. As Aristotle 
 says, it is simply shocking. And the difference of 
 our own feeling in this respect serves to measure the 
 interval between the two tragedies. On this account 
 the only possible protagonist for the Athenian was 
 the sort that we have had in mind all along — the 
 fallible character, neither wholly good nor wholly 
 bad, but liable to error. As such he is subject to 
 pity by his infirmity and to horror by his iniquity — 
 he is amenable equally to the requirements of 
 problem and solution. 
 
 In addition to these features of Greek tragedy, 
 which may be regarded as primary inasmuch as they 
 derive immediately from its postulates and are nec- 
 essary corollaries of its definition, there are others 
 mentioned by Aristotle as incidental and ancillary. 
 Their presence is the test of a complex, as distin- 
 guished from a simple action, which hinges solely 
 upon a metabasis or reverse of fortune, while the 
 former may also include a peripeteia, an agnition, 
 and a sensation (Tados)- 1 As a matter of fact, then, 
 these secondary characters are merely special de- 
 vices for reinforcing the emotional impression of 
 qualm and catharsis, which, as he observes, is more 
 impressive when the incidents of the drama occur 
 
 1 Though Aristotle fails to mention irados with 7repi7rereia and 
 avayvoipLais as one of the differentiae of complex tragedy, he 
 discusses it immediately in connection with these other two as 
 a third part of the nvdos. At the same time the Prometheus 
 Bound is opened by a ttclOo*, if indeed the whole play is not one 
 prolonged irddos. Since the whole distinction is of no great 
 importance in this connection, there is no particular use in 
 discussing here.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 175 
 
 contrary to expectation, and still more so when they 
 occur by reason of one another. 1 So a peripeteia 
 is defined as an effect by which an antecedent pro- 
 duces, not the consequence expected, but one entirely 
 unlooked for and yet necessary and intelligible. In 
 much the same way an agnition is the recognition 
 by a character of some person or object of whose 
 identity he was at first unaware. As such an effect 
 is likely to cause a revulsion of feeling and a change 
 of intention on the part of the character concerned, 
 it frequently though not invariably involves a peri- 
 peteia. A sensation, as I have ventured to translate 
 the term it ados, is a particularly harrowing inci- 
 dent, which instead of being reported by messenger 
 or otherwise, is enacted under the eyes of the spec- 
 tators. As conducive of surprise and suspense, 
 intensity and immediacy, these effects may be looked 
 upon as elements of plot in the present connotation 
 of the word. To be sure, they want the elaboration 
 of the modern intrigue, where the dramatic action 
 has come to be developed chiefly in the sense of 
 the " interesting " as the dramatis personal chiefly 
 in the sense of the " characteristic." But though 
 they have remained subject to the primary uses of 
 tragedy in the enforcement of problem and solution, 
 yet their very presence should be a warning against 
 
 1 SlaWrjXa. Hardly by cause and effect in the modern con- 
 notation, as the case of Mitys' statue at Argos proves. The 
 connection in Aristotle's mind, I venture to think, was moral, 
 not physical. Of course I do not mean to imply that Aristotle 
 was without the notion of causal sequence and that he may 
 not have had it in the corner of his eye in this case. But I 
 conceive that his idea of cause in this instance would have in- 
 cluded that of reason also; it would have involved an answer 
 to the question why as well as to the question how.
 
 176 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 a not uncommon manner of speaking as though 
 Greek tragedy were deficient somehow in dramatic 
 action and were largely an affair of declamation and 
 recitation. 
 
 Such an insinuation is founded only in a serious 
 confusion. It is not unusual nowadays to talk as 
 though a lively and bustling stage or a picturesque 
 and striking tableau were all-sufficient evidences of 
 dramatic quality. But if movement and stir, spec- 
 tacle and panorama were indeed dramatic, then 
 would vaudeville be justified of its triumph. Under 
 the circumstances it is hardly otiose to remark that 
 for genuine drama it is hardly enough to set the char- 
 acters' legs in motion; their passions must be 
 aroused as well. It is not so much motion as emotion 
 that makes drama. Mrs. Siddons is said to have 
 had a way of pronouncing Lear's curse, while holding 
 her arms rigidly at her sides, with an effect that was 
 terrible beyond gesticulation. Only as the outward 
 act gives rise to feeling or expresses it, does the act 
 itself become dramatic. It is not mere action but 
 significant action that counts. Nothing could be 
 busier than a scene of Victor Hugo's. It is full of 
 sound and fury, commotion and vociferation; and 
 yet when you come to look inside for the internal 
 drama which all this outward show and circumstance 
 should body forth, what hollowness and vacuity 
 you find ! While as for the vaunted violences of the 
 romantic stage they too miss the mark as often as 
 not. Critics have wasted their ingenuity in trying 
 to defend the sanguinary ending of King Lear. In 
 spite of the spiritual interest and importance of 
 the murder which closes Othello, it is a fair question
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 177 
 
 whether Shakespeare has not overreached himself 
 in strangling Desdemona in public. In all such cases 
 the mind is so shaken or distracted by the physical 
 act as to be incapable of attending to its ethical 
 import. The impression, so far from being en- 
 hanced, is blunted by the theatrical exaggeration. 
 
 On the other hand, such a poem as Goethe's 
 Iphigenie goes to the opposite extreme. Admirable 
 as it is in its own way, it is lacking both in dramatic 
 action and in theatrical activity. It has nobility; 
 but it is the nobility of reflection, not of passion. 
 No wonder that Goethe himself could never see it 
 performed with patience. And yet tragedy, while 
 representing passion, does not present it for its own 
 sake. Tragedy implies an aim, an end or purpose to 
 be accomplished — a labour, ttovos, an exertion. 
 There is a fatal necessity constraining the dramatis 
 personal to act and causing an interplay of motives, 
 a fluctuation of emotion. To use the phraseology 
 of the day, a play is not static but dynamic. It 
 involves will, volition; it is not a mere state of feel- 
 ing or even a succession of such states — but rather 
 an agitation of spirit. Hence the necessity of a 
 metabasis, as Aristotle calls it, or reverse of fortune. 
 And it is just the point of drama that this revulsion 
 of feeling should be capable of visible translation. 
 Of all modern dramatists it is Shakespeare who 
 combines most effectively this dramatic movement 
 with theatrical activity. It is another and not the 
 least of his many superiorities that he should so often 
 succeed at once in setting up a genuine dramatic 
 action in the souls of his people and in expressing 
 so perfectly that inner revolution by an outward
 
 178 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 and physical animation. In Racine's tragedy, 
 perfect in its kind as it is, there is always, it must 
 be acknowledged, a disposition to repress the latter 
 element in accordance with the proprieties and to 
 rely too exclusively upon recitation alone to carry 
 the dramatic action. As a matter of fact Corneille's 
 most admired effects are usually an affair of elo- 
 quence, even oratory. 
 
 In this respect too much altogether has been 
 made of the so-called statuesqueness and plasticity 
 of Greek tragedy. As long as the performance was 
 supposed to be confined to an impossibly high and 
 shallow stage, along which the actors were silhou- 
 etted like the figures in a bas-relief, such a concep- 
 tion was perhaps unavoidable. But with the orches- 
 tra as the site of the action it is no longer necessary 
 or plausible. That Greek acting had little of the 
 minute realism which characterizes ours, is undoubt- 
 edly true. But that it was prevailingly declamation 
 and recitation, that it wanted stage-effect, the text 
 of Electra should be sufficient to disprove, to say 
 nothing of Aristotle's commentary. Indeed, on the 
 strength of the devices that I have been speaking of 
 — peripeteia, agnition, and pathos — M. Lemaitre 
 goes so far as to rebuke i^ristotle for his sensation- 
 alism. Very well. But what what does M. Lemaitre 
 expect? What is tragedy if it is not sensational? 
 And while Greek acting lacked realism, there must 
 have been a breadth, a massiveness, a gravity about 
 it more suitable to the desperate purposes of trag- 
 edy, for that dark and sinister background, than our 
 painstaking pastiche of common reality, of the 
 speaking voice and the daily face.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 179 
 
 IV 
 
 From this sort of criticism there is danger of 
 carrying away a false and one-sided idea of the sub- 
 ject. In the end Greek tragedy does leave an 
 impression of dignity, repose, and serenity, more or 
 less suggestive, perhaps, of the epithet statuesque. 
 But the satisfaction resides, as I have already indi- 
 cated, in its treatment, not in its subject-matter. In 
 the latter aspect it is, if anything, more terrible, 
 monstrous, and revolting than our Elizabethan trag- 
 edy of blood. In the German Sturm und Drang 
 itself there is nothing to exceed the story of the 
 Atreides, upon which the Oresteia and the two 
 Electras are based. The reproaches that Voltaire 
 addressed to Hamlet might just as well have been 
 addressed to the (Edipus. The mere repetition of 
 such names is enough to show how elemental is the 
 the substance of Greek tragedy and how helplessly 
 its composure depends, not upon this crude and san- 
 guinary material, but upon the spirit with which 
 it was animated and the ideas with which it was 
 informed. As mere stuff its superiority over the 
 Nibelungen Lied and Beowulf is not great. As 
 drama its superiority consists in the profound moral 
 significance with which the Greek had imbued it. 
 And in this case the merit belongs to the race as 
 well as the dramatist, for whose hand it was partly 
 prepared before he touched it. It was the genius of 
 the people which had fitted these sinister old legends 
 for tragic treatment by deepening their content and 
 suggestion. In themselves they are like windows
 
 180 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 opening upon a remote and savage antiquity, through 
 which it is still possible to catch a glimpse of wild 
 irrational powers moving obscurely in the gloom, 
 of the fitful workings of casualty and chance — 
 perfidies of nature and miscarriages of reason. Con- 
 sider only the labyrinth of (Edipus or the ambages 
 of Ion. 
 
 These were the subjects that gave the Greek his 
 opportunity. He was grappling with tremendous 
 problems, he was struggling for a foothold on the 
 brink of unreason, he was confronting the irrespon- 
 sible demonic forces of creation, he was wrestling 
 for the secrets of destiny. And the ground-work 
 of his tragedy was vast, portentous, and preter- 
 natural. 
 
 And yet out of all this confusion and anarchy 
 there seemed to be something slowly shaping — an 
 event, an issue, a fate — directing itself more or 
 less vaguely, in the midst of uncertainty and dread, 
 to some far off and indistinguishable end. Careless 
 of guilt and innocence, heedlessness and premedita- 
 tion, it spared one and spoiled another indifferently; 
 it required the child of its parents and the mother 
 of her son; it snared alike the crafty and the unwary, 
 the pious and the scoffer. Unprognosticable, it did 
 not want for records: whatever came to pass, bore 
 witness to its passage; in particular, its trail lay 
 over certain great houses and illustrious families. 
 Capricious as its dealings with the individual might 
 seem, it was impossible in the long run to deny 
 them a kind of coherence or rough and ready logic. 
 Was it possible to go still farther: in spite of mis- 
 leading appearances and occasional inconsistencies
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 181 
 
 could they be reconciled on the whole with the ideal 
 of an absolute and impartial justice? 
 
 Such was the problem which the dramatists in- 
 herited. In the case of ^Eschylus, however, it is 
 evident that this attempt at the moralization of 
 fate has by no means met with perfect success. In 
 what remains of the Promethean trilogy, which is 
 with the Oresteia the most significant in this 
 respect of all his extant work, the result looks very 
 much like a compromise. The atmosphere of Prome- 
 theus Bound is, it must be confessed, a pretty un- 
 certain medium for the conveyance of clear ideas. 
 It is the day after the deluge, and the air is still 
 thick and troubled. Even ^Eschylus himself is 
 shaken. It would be hard to say how much of the 
 modern feeling of security is due to a belief in the 
 uniformity of nature, how much to a faith in the 
 beneficence of an over-ruling providence. The latter 
 serves to guarantee the moral order in as far as it has 
 not become a matter of total indifference to us, for 
 we seem to have given up any very serious thought 
 of the establishment of such an order in the world 
 at large; while the former acts as a warranty for the 
 physical order with whose ascendency we seem to 
 have made up our minds to rest content. But how- 
 ever this may be and whatever their relative propor- 
 tions, take away these two convictions and our world 
 would fall to pieces. And yet ./Eschylus had neither 
 of them. He had no sense of the mechanical con- 
 catenation of nature and he had no surety for his 
 gods. Divinity, as his religion and traditions rep- 
 resented it, might be poetic; it was anything but 
 moral. In a word, it was a divinity quite in the
 
 1 82 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 present aesthetic taste — an artistic being without 
 moral irrelevances, which would heartily have ap- 
 plauded the programme I'art pour I'art, but would 
 hardly have made a reliable guardian of manners. 
 In default, then, of a deity to whom the regulation 
 of such matters might safely be entrusted, iEschylus 
 could only fall back upon fate itself as above and 
 beyond the gods — or else let the moral order go 
 by the board, and with it the only law and security 
 for existence of which he had any conception. But 
 if Zeus' treatment of Prometheus was shocking, was 
 it not equally shocking of fate to permit, to say 
 nothing of ordaining, such an atrocity? What pos- 
 sible justice was there in condemning Prometheus 
 to torture for his benefits to humanity in defiance 
 of a tyrant, usurper, and parricide, whose highest 
 title to consideration would seem to consist in the 
 fact that he was able to command the services of 
 Kratos and Bia? 
 
 That this question, which is obviously the ques- 
 tion raised by the drama, is answered in a thoroughly 
 decisive and satisfactory manner, it would be idle 
 to maintain in the face of all the conflicting inter- 
 pretations of which the play has been the subject. 
 At the same time, I believe that even as far as it 
 goes, the drama does answer the question partially, 
 and answers it in accordance with the general prin- 
 ciples of Attic tragedy. That /Eschylus sympa- 
 thized with Prometheus, is pretty clear. No doubt 
 the audience sympathized with him too. But not- 
 withstanding the representations of modern criticism 
 I venture to think that he was not to the Greek the 
 purely sympathetic character which he has become
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 183 
 
 for the modern. As far as bare intention goes, he 
 was properly an object of pity in his distress, after 
 the usual fashion of the tragedy in which he figured. 
 At the same time his sacrilege, which has lost its 
 sting for us, must have made him for the Greeks 
 an object of horror equally. Either so; or the feel- 
 ings by which Aristotle defines the impression 
 of his tragedy, must be so indefinite and diffused 
 as to make his statement altogether pointless — 
 an apergu rather than a definition. That JEs- 
 chylus makes no attempt to gloze his protag- 
 onist's fault, ought to be decisive. Unmistakably 
 as he sympathizes with Prometheus, it is significant 
 that he carefully refrains from justifying him. On 
 the contrary, he appears on one occasion at least 
 to have put an admission of guilt into his mouth — 
 r\fiapTov, ovk apt^crojucu. Nor does it matter par- 
 ticularly how riiiapTov be translated in this connec- 
 tion; to err or even mistake in these matters was 
 for the Greek, as I have pointed out, none the less 
 a sin. In so far, then, ^Eschylus keeps the idea un- 
 obscured. Prometheus suffers; but then Prometheus 
 has violated the law for Titan as for man, and to 
 that extent his punishment is just. 
 
 And yet while this is true, it must be conceded 
 in excuse of another range of interpretation that 
 ^Eschylus shows a little reluctance to trancher the 
 question. It is as though the matter were not quite 
 clear in his own mind. While he refrains from justi- 
 fying Prometheus, it is equally significant that he 
 does not exert himself to justify Zeus either. Rather 
 he represents him as himself obnoxious to justice — 
 wherein, to be sure, he seems to have followed his
 
 184 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 traditions. For his own part, however, he is by no 
 means sure that the law of Zeus is a moral law; 
 while as for his act itself he evidently regards it as 
 abhorrent in its extremity and depicts it as an act 
 of violence — a irados in the technically Aristotelian 
 sense. Hence his reserves. He will not gainsay the 
 offense, but his heart is divided. If both are liable — 
 for does not fate impend upon Zeus also? — then he 
 seems to feel as though the fault of the god excused 
 or minimized that of the Titan. There is something 
 wrong somewhere — with the institution of Zeus, 
 perhaps. Of one thing alone he is perfectly certain 
 — that order is better than chaos. The rule of 
 Zeus may be arbitrary, it may rest on force; and yet 
 it is a rule. It may not be thoroughly equitable 
 as yet, as an institution it may need rectification; 
 but it is better than confusion, it is the one means 
 to security and stability. He who resists and defies 
 it, is guilty of an attempt to subvert the provisional 
 moral government in the interests of anarchy. 
 There is no help for it: he is an agitator, a disturber 
 of the peace; he must be quelled. 
 
 Prometheus, then, is the revolutionary. He is the 
 first of mutineers, and to this fact he owes his for- 
 tune as the great romantic and humanitarian symbol. 
 He belongs to the race of dissidents, nonconformists, 
 insurgents, or whatever name they may be called, 
 who revolt against a necessary discipline, tradi- 
 tional or established, in the name of a lawless and 
 indeterminate ideal. No wonder that he received 
 an apotheosis in the age which promoted revolution 
 to the rank of a political institution. He is one of 
 that dangerous class of reformers who refuse to
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 185 
 
 proceed by due process of law, who are impatient 
 of its restraints and delays, and would suddenly 
 take the execution of justice into their own hasty 
 hands. Like them he obeys no higher principle 
 than his own sympathies; he will justify the means 
 by the end and shelter in the day of judgment under 
 the fairness of his intentions. He is the classical 
 embodiment of individual justice; he does what 
 seems good in his own eyes. That he would do right, 
 is sentimentally a migitating circumstance; his crime 
 is that he would do right wilfully and after his own 
 mind. That he happens to right a wrong, to antici- 
 pate a reform — that he is the noblest of rebels, 
 makes the demoralization of his example no less — 
 rather the greater. Nor does it affect the issue par- 
 ticularly that his rebellion is directed against a 
 tentative and imperfect administration. What ad- 
 ministration is otherwise? 
 
 The illustration may seem far fetched; but I 
 never read the Prometheus that I am not reminded 
 of a pensee of Pascal's: 
 
 " It is proper to observe right ; it is necessary to 
 observe might. Right without might is powerless; might 
 without right is tyrannical. Right without might is 
 disputed, because there are always the wicked; might 
 without right is reviled. It is necessary, therefore, to 
 unite right and might, and for that purpose to make 
 right mighty or might right. 
 
 " But right is subject to dispute; might is easily recog- 
 nizable and is indisputable. Hence it is impossible to 
 annex might to right, because might has contradicted 
 and asserted that she alone is right. And so, since it 
 is impossible to make right mighty, we have made might 
 right."
 
 1 86 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Not that this conception answers exactly to JEs- 
 chylus' whole thought. What Pascal regards as a 
 permanent state of affairs, ^schylus contemplates 
 as a transient condition. But Pascal's notion is 
 true enough for the moment marked by the Prome- 
 theus Bound, " might till right is ready." In order 
 that justice may be ultimately ensured, it is neces- 
 sary first to found a power capable of maintaining 
 some sort of order and discipline, from which by a 
 process of gradual correction and improvement may 
 be developed a more and more perfect justice, in 
 which the rights of humanity itself shall receive their 
 proper recognition. Such is apparently the condition 
 on which Zeus is suffered to reign; he too must ad- 
 just himself to a higher principle than his own 
 conveniency. For the correction and perfection, as 
 for the maintenance, of that moral order to which 
 the obedience of inferior beings is due, Zeus him- 
 self is answerable to the fate which palpably over- 
 hangs him throughout the tragedy. He must recon- 
 cile himself with Prometheus, he must find a modus 
 vivendi with the champion of mankind, which has 
 its rightful place also in the universal polity — 
 before his sovereignty is confirmed. If the conclu- 
 sion of the trilogy were in evidence, it is probably 
 with this accommodation that it would deal. The 
 first necessity, however, is to create the idea of 
 justice and to establish it. And if Zeus is justly on 
 probation for his management, Prometheus is no less 
 justly in duress for rebelling, in the hot-headed old 
 Titanic fashion, against the sole authority by which 
 this result may be accomplished and its fruits se- 
 cured. Before the advent of justice the world must 
 be broken of Titanism.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 187 
 
 Such, it seems to me, is the sense of the drama; 
 and the Oresteia tends, I think, to confirm this 
 conclusion. The theme is the same in both in- 
 stances. In the latter case, however, where we have 
 the whole story, there is less danger of mistaking 
 its purport. The only difficulty is that just as the 
 modern reader's impression of the Prometheus is 
 falsified by a failure to feel the horror of Prome- 
 theus' sacrilege, so here his judgment of the Ores- 
 teia is liable to be warped inversely by an inability 
 to feel the pity of Orestes' murderous legacy. What 
 requires emotional correction with respect to the 
 tragic passions at present, is not the odium but the 
 pathos of the action. There is nothing equivocal 
 about Orestes' guilt: matricide is as abhorrent to-day 
 as it ever was. But private vengeance is no longer 
 recognized as a duty; there is nothing that is sacred, 
 little that is sympathetic, about it. In the mind of 
 the Greeks, however, who appreciated the obliga- 
 tion of the latter as fully as the abomination of the 
 former, the situation inspired the usual tragic du- 
 plicity of feeling. They were of a temper to be 
 touched by the dutifulness of Agamemnon's avenger 
 and to be horrified at the impiety of Clytemnestra's 
 executioner. Otherwise, I am at a loss to account 
 for my sentiments in reading the trilogy; for I must 
 confess that my wishes are for the success of Orestes 
 and his sister, much as I may reprobate the deed 
 by which it is assured. Nor is this the sentiment 
 of the situation as such; it is not in the Electra of 
 Euripides. The ^Eschylean Orestes, though a crimi- 
 nal in act, is no epileptic monster like the Euripi- 
 dean: albeit he does not lend himself so readily to
 
 1 88 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 humanitarian attitudinizing, there is as much to be 
 said for him as for Prometheus. And curiously 
 enough, it is Euripides who finally says it, though 
 not much to his advantage, in vilifying Apollo as the 
 instigator of his crime. As for ^schylus, however, 
 he accuses Apollo no more than he does Zeus — for 
 one thing which romantic criticism has overlooked 
 is the fact that if Zeus is to blame for Prometheus' 
 plight, Apollo is equally to blame for Orestes' and 
 with less excuse because without provocation. At 
 best the circumstances are different, the responsi- 
 bility is the same. It is fair, therefore, to argue 
 that ^Eschylus' idea must have been alike in both 
 cases. But if anything is clear, it is that the author 
 of the Oresteia is no romanticist; he is not disinte- 
 grating the moral edifice but cementing it; he is not 
 relaxing discipline but tightening it. It is not at 
 Apollo's expense that he claims the audience's pity 
 for Orestes, whose saving virtue, as compared with 
 Prometheus, is his submission to authority. What 
 is impossible and intolerable in his situation is the 
 fault of an imperfect and makeshift institution, the 
 lex talionis, whose whole enormity is finally demon- 
 strated in the fatal dilemna of this last sad inheritor 
 of a bloody old tradition. The impulsive movements 
 of private retaliation must give way to the deliberate 
 decisions of an impartial and dispassionate court. 
 And though it would be an insult to justice, were the 
 perpetrator of what is after all a monstrous crime, 
 allowed to go scot free, yet it is only equity that he 
 whose sufferings have been the occasion of reform, 
 should benefit by the amendment to whose adoption 
 he has at least contributed.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 189 
 
 In these pieces at which I have glanced as those 
 most critically interested in the method and concep- 
 tion of Attic tragedy, ^schylus is concerned mainly 
 for the reconciliation of might and right through the 
 medium of divine legislation — what we should call 
 nowadays in secular terms the evolution of justice. 
 The subject corresponds with his place in the history 
 of tragic ideas and responds to the conscious craving 
 for a definite moral constitution. His problem is 
 one of institutional morality — if such a phrase is 
 permissible in such a connection; its solution is an 
 affair of moral statesmanship and administration. 
 Personally I do not believe that a more tremendous 
 tragedy than Agamemnon has ever been written: I 
 do not know of any tragic impression more awe- 
 inspiring than that produced by Cassandra arrested 
 by the spirit of prophecy at the door of the Atreides' 
 palace. For this reason I hesitate to call the prob- 
 lems of private morality deeper and necessarily 
 more tragic, after the current manner of speaking. 
 But at all events they are different; and it is these 
 problems, raised by spontaneous impulses and by 
 promptings of conscience hopelessly at odds with 
 the determinations of life and society, which are 
 Sophocles' peculiarly. 
 
 In Prometheus and the Oresteia the tragic schism 
 is wholly external; it is due to a maladjustment 
 which may be corrected without permanent harm to 
 the persons involved. But every anomaly felt as 
 tragic is not to be explained or reconciled so happily. 
 There are instances in which it is inherent and fatal; 
 in which it involves an organic lesion. It is so with 
 (Edipus; not only is his crime his own but the re-
 
 190 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 sponsibility is his also. Unlike the .Eschylean Ores- 
 tes he acts by and for himself and at his own peril. 
 To be sure, it may be said that like Prometheus 
 he acts in behalf of others and in the interests of 
 the general, whether or not by prescription. But 
 there is a difference. It is not without intention 
 that Sophocles has centered the drama, not upon that 
 portion of his protagonist's career which has been 
 mazed and darkened by celestial counsels, but rather 
 upon that portion in which he, the child of fate — 
 7rcus tvxvs , as he calls himself with cruelly un- 
 conscious irony — has the temerity to act by his 
 own lights with infatuate confidence in the clarity 
 of his own vision — he, the puppet of destiny, 
 blindfold from birth, who has never taken a step 
 with a full sense of the conditions and consequences 
 of his action. It is this pretender to clairvoyance, 
 this dabbler in enigmas, the reader of the riddling 
 Sphinx whom Sophocles represents as pretending 
 lightheartedly to unravel the mystery of his own 
 being. He is a great criminal, to be sure; but he 
 has become so inadvertently and as a result of such 
 a skein of fatality that it is doubtful whether his 
 lot would not be wholly pitiful (as, indeed, many 
 have found it, le grand Corneille among them, who 
 have failed to attend strictly to the action) if it 
 were not for the pertinacity with which he is seen to 
 pursue destruction in insensate conceit of his own 
 sufficiency. And to the same effect the length of 
 time which is supposed to have elapsed since his 
 crimes — so long have they lain concealed that they 
 would seem entitled to a measure of immunity, as 
 by a kind of unwritten statute of limitations, were
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 191 
 
 it not for the fact that he himself is the one who 
 finally unearths them. Had he been brought to ac- 
 count by another, it would have appeared little better 
 than a divine inequity. I do not believe that any- 
 one can read the tragedy intelligently without being 
 sensible of presumption, of gross moral impropriety 
 in the bias whereby CEdipus is impelled to seek for 
 himself the solution of his own problematic exist- 
 ence. It is no correction of institutions that will 
 mend his case — nothing but a reformation of the 
 entire character. 
 
 With all this I am puzzled to understand why 
 the CEdipus has never received the same sort of phi- 
 losophical rating as the Prometheus. Its significance 
 is, if anything, more profound and is certainly 
 much more general. It is the very type of life 
 universal. While lending itself with equal readiness 
 to " symbolic " interpretation, it has never been sur- 
 passed as a figure of human responsibility in par- 
 ticular. We are all of us without exception in 
 CEdipus' case — rounded like him with ignorance 
 and mystery, and yet obliged to act incessantly 
 and at our own hazard, so that our every step seems 
 a presumption deserving of disaster and our every 
 judgment an arrogance inviting rebuke and humili- 
 ation. Of all Greek tragedy the CEdipus Tyrannus 
 seems to me not only the most characteristic of the 
 genius which produced it but also most applicable 
 to our hapless human lot. 
 
 At the same time I must confess to a particular 
 affection for the Electra. Perhaps it is the situations 
 that especially please me — Orestes at the gate of the 
 palace overhearing his sister's lamentation; Electra
 
 192 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 herself with the funeral urn in her hands; the recog- 
 nition with its sudden revulsion of feeling. In the 
 face of the impending abomination there is some- 
 thing singularly affecting in the attachment of these 
 two ill-starred children of a murdered father — the 
 dependence of the one, the assurance of the other. 
 But however this may be, the important matter for 
 the inherence of Sophoclean tragedy is the shift of 
 the traditional center of interest from Orestes him- 
 self to his sister. However it may be with him, she 
 at least is under no divine compulsion. Her only 
 abettor is her conscience. She acts of her own 
 accord and by the exigency of her own nature. 
 
 But after all the clearest illustration of Sophocles' 
 conception of the tragic as something intimate and 
 essential is to be found in neither of these pieces 
 but in the Antigone. Ethic I was about to call it. 
 And for that matter what is the source of tragedy 
 in the Antigone but the collision of an ethic with a 
 moral principle — of the fatal propensities of char- 
 acter with the prescriptions of social or civil expedi- 
 ency or necessity? It is the usual Sophoclean theme, 
 the theme of (Edipus and Electra; but it comes out 
 here more distinctly than elsewhere on account of 
 what appears to us the superior sanctity of the for- 
 mer, the individual principle — or rather, probably, 
 on account of the comparative insignificance of the 
 latter. And yet in view of the Greek's devotion to 
 his city — a devotion for which, narrow, short- 
 sighted, and suicidal though we esteem it, he showed 
 himself willing again and again to sacrifice every 
 advantage and undergo every hardship, I can not 
 make so light of Antigone's contempt of what to her
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 193 
 
 countrymen was patriotism as do many critics for 
 whose opinions I usually feel the greatest deference. 
 What else was her conduct in Greek eyes than 
 treasonable? And little as we are at a point of 
 view to appreciate this sentiment (though this is 
 by no means the only instance on record 
 of sectional or parochial animosity or of the 
 obloquy incurred by non-adherents of local or 
 party politics) I still believe that Antigone's 
 disloyalty to the polity — or what was bound to 
 seem such in the heat of a great public excitement — 
 must have been a scandal to a Greek audience, 
 which was, on the other hand, in no less favourable 
 disposition of spirit, in comparison with us, to sym- 
 pathize with her religious scruples as distinct from 
 the purely personal pathos of her condition and be- 
 ing. And so it is, I believe, that Sophocles intended 
 her to appear — like other tragic protagonists, as 
 an object of horror no less than of pity; otherwise, 
 there would be something gratuitous in the extraordi- 
 nary severity which characterizes his chief magis- 
 trate, by her attitude to whom, as the representative 
 of the government, Antigone's faithlessness to the 
 commonwealth is dramatically measured. To be 
 sure, such asperity is natural enough to a person or 
 a people in the reaction succeeding immediately 
 upon a tremendous crisis. But if that were all, if 
 the point were merely psychological, Sophocles 
 would hardly have been so careful to restore the 
 equilibrium by meting out a final judgment to Creon 
 for exceeding the just measure, There is no doubt, 
 it seems to me, about his intention; he will not 
 countenance contempt of the supreme impersonal
 
 194 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 law on the part of an individual whatever his or her 
 title on other grounds to admiration or respect; 
 for " value dwells not in particular will." 
 
 But at the same time, while Antigone fits the 
 framework of its genre and is no exception to the 
 general definition of Greek tragedy, I am well aware 
 that for us to-day, whose ideas of religious and 
 civic duty are so different, such an interpretation 
 must seem far-fetched and forced. Indeed, there is 
 no tragedy, I fancy, even of the Greeks, with respect 
 to whose moral bases we are at such a disadvantage. 
 The burial motive is as remote from our instinct as 
 the cult of the city; we are as unfitted to respond 
 to the one as to the other. It is the person of the 
 heroine almost exclusively that appeals to us. Ele- 
 mentally, she is not the representative of any special 
 duty or set of duties — though if she were not sus- 
 tained by a sense of duty, she would not be the 
 noble and touching figure she is. For our emotions 
 it is not the mere political and social crux which 
 makes the play — this is but the vehicle; it is the 
 case of conscience. What renders the tragedy pe- 
 culiarly affecting among the tragedies of Sophocles, 
 what gives it its specific flavour is not merely the 
 bare dilemma — the consciousness of rectitude 
 which can neither surrender its convictions without 
 shame nor persist in them without ruin, but the 
 nature of the protagonist — her sex and youth, her 
 ill-omened birth and her attachment to the son of 
 her executioner. No wonder that she has become 
 for the modern one of the great sympathetic char- 
 acters of literature, like Cordelia, and her tragedy 
 a sentimental one.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 195 
 
 On the other hand, while Sophocles holds the 
 scales even — while he gives the ethical and the 
 moral elements alike their due — to the heroine's 
 womanliness its meed of compassionate admiration 
 as to the tyrant's arrogance its fitting correction, 
 at the same time that he asserts the existence of 
 a higher authority than the judgment of particulars 
 — yet for all this, which escapes us more or less but 
 was clear enough to the Greeks, I would not assert 
 that he himself had in mind any such fleshless for- 
 mula as that which I have applied to his work. All 
 I mean, is that he conceived in a certain way and 
 to a certain effect, which I have tried to analyse — 
 roughly and bunglingly enough, I dare say. No 
 doubt he worked by touch, not by measure. He was 
 not likely to stop to anatomize an effective subject 
 if it yielded the proper emotions on inspection. 
 But that in spite of the modern perplexity of its 
 theme and the spontaneity of its creation the Anti- 
 gone does take down regularly, I have tried to show. 
 Generically and schematically it is, like the other 
 works of its author, the tragedy of the indi- 
 vidual will. 
 
 In general terms, it is from the same source, the 
 conflict of the ethic with the moral, that Euripides 
 derives his drama. But unlike his predecessors he 
 fails to sustain the supremacy or even the im- 
 portance of the latter principle, and failing to do so, 
 misses the distinctive double note of Greek tragedy. 
 His favourite procedure is to represent morality as 
 a hollow convention or tradition with little or no 
 title to reverence or credit. As a result his char- 
 acters are either interesting sinners like Medea and
 
 196 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Phaedra or superstitious bigots and credulous gulls 
 like Orestes and Menelaus. They are seldom or 
 never actuated by conscience or conviction, a sense 
 of duty or obligation, but impulse or appetite, desire 
 or caprice. Like Racine's heroes and heroines, they 
 are creatures of passion, not of resolution — they 
 suffer their destiny rather than incur it. Of the 
 same order too are the motives of his divinities 
 like the Aphrodite in Hippolytus or the Apollo 
 in Ion. 
 
 Particularly Ion — what can be said of its pur- 
 port? What system can possibly make moral sense 
 of such a skein of divine knavery and deceit? In 
 these respects the play is so illustrative of the Euri- 
 pidean skepsis as to merit a brief analysis. If the 
 prologue as spoken by Hermes contains the data 
 of the piece — and I can see no justification on this 
 occasion for traversing Euripides' usual practice — 
 then, we must take it for settled that Ion is the son 
 of Apollo and Creusa. 1 After an indefinite interval 
 of neglect, during which Creusa has married Xuthus, 
 and her child, miraculously rescued from exposure 
 and carried to Delphi, has been brought up in the 
 service of the temple, Phoebus, desirous at last of 
 establishing his son advantageously, plots to fob 
 off the youth upon Xuthus as an illegimate son of 
 the latter. This fraud he has no great difficulty in 
 perpetrating with the aid of his oracle, assisted to 
 some extent by Xuthus' credulity. The scheme is 
 in a fair way to succeed but for Creusa's ignorance 
 of the boy's identity. And this is a weak joint in 
 
 1 But compare the interesting introduction to Yerrall's edition 
 of the play, to which I am not a little indebted.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 197 
 
 the structure of the drama; for it would seem 
 natural that Phoebus should contrive some means of 
 advising Creusa beforehand of his amiable inten- 
 tions. As a matter of fact, however, Creusa, revolted 
 by her husband's attempt to smuggle his suppositi- 
 tious child into the family, conspires with her servant 
 against Ion's life but to such ill effect that she 
 is in imminent danger of losing her own. In the 
 pinch there seems no way of saving her but to declare 
 the truth. Hence the production by the priestess 
 of the cradle and the so-called " proofs." However, 
 it may be with the cold-blooded critic, this evidence 
 is sufficient to convince Creusa that Ion, the youth 
 whom she has plotted to kill, is indeed her child; 
 while for the audience the evidence is confirmed, we 
 must believe, by the testimony of Athena, who by 
 way of saving Apollo's face, appears as the dea ex 
 machina, in Euripides' habitual manner, to close the 
 play. The piece terminates, then, with the triumphal 
 accomplishment of the celestial rascality. Xuthus 
 has already been brought to acknowlege the boy as 
 the fruit of his own amour; and now Creusa accepts 
 him for her part by a similar motive, though on 
 better grounds. The principals are in accord; and 
 Ion's fortune is assured. As to the possibility that 
 Xuthus may learn of the deception on some future 
 occasion, that contingency lies without the bound- 
 aries of the play and need not be discussed. 
 
 Upon the ethics of the characters, divine and 
 human, concerned in this travesty of providence, 
 comment is superfluous. They are all unscrupulous 
 equally. If anything, indignation sways slightly to 
 the advantage of Xuthus as the party actually
 
 198 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 abused. Nevertheless he himself is quite unable to 
 appear in court with clean hands. The only case 
 deserving of commiseration is Ion's. He has no 
 first-hand information of any sort concerning his 
 birth or the manner of it; he knows only the two 
 contradictory accounts of his parentage — the one 
 sponsored by the oracle to the effect that his father 
 is Xuthus, the other by Athena to the effect that his 
 father is Apollo and his mother Creusa. It is all 
 very well for the audience to credit the latter report; 
 they have a confidential source of information in 
 the prologue. It is very well for Creusa too to do 
 so, if she will; she knows the circumstances of her 
 son's birth and exposure. It is very well even for 
 Xuthus to think as he does at his own peril; he 
 knows at least his past and its opportunities. For 
 all of these parties to the transaction there is some 
 possibility of comfort in their faith. But what can 
 be the state of Ion's mind? Obviously, one of the 
 divine communications must be a lie — either the 
 oracle of Apollo or the messenger of Apollo is false. 
 And if one is false, which? And if either is false, 
 what is the security for the other? Why not both, 
 then, since they speak for the same principal? And 
 in that case, how about the priestess with her cradle 
 and her " proofs " ? Ion may like to take his 
 mother's word. But faith and security are dead 
 forever. From the happy, confident and confiding 
 ministrant of the god, serving the temple and scat- 
 tering the intrusions of the birds with playful threats 
 and mimic violence, he is doomed logically to an 
 anxious and troubled future; and he passes sullenly 
 into the great doubt that has been prepared for him.
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 199 
 
 Such is the characteristic moral ambiguity or 
 obliquity of the Euripidean denouement. 
 
 And the illustration is a fair one. As Euripides' 
 tragedy is destitute of a principle of any kind it has 
 no minatory or exemplary force to speak of. If it 
 is moral at all, it is so, not in the ^schylean or 
 Sophoclean, but in the modern, the humanitarian, 
 manner. In this one sense, since his drama — with 
 the exception of a few artless and appealing but 
 hardly tragic figures, like Ion, who are usually the 
 dupes or victims of the plausible and unscrupulous 
 knaves about them — since his drama is a marvel- 
 lous illustration of the vices, frailties, and weak- 
 nesses, the " humanity " of mortals, its author is 
 not undeserving of the epithet with which he has 
 been graced by a late romantic admirer, " Euripides 
 the human " — an attribution with whose sentiment 
 a majority of Athenian critics would probably have 
 concurred. 
 
 In these respects Euripides is not very unlike 
 Ibsen. Like the latter he too is unmistakably 
 decadent and obsessed by the nightmare of ugliness. 
 It is not so much, perhaps, that he dotes upon the 
 sordid, the base, and the malodorous — though at 
 times he displays no little complacency in their de- 
 piction — as that they haunt and fascinate him; 
 they block up his view till he can see little or nothing 
 else. As far as he is concerned, the heroic has ceased 
 to exist; Helen is a baggage, Agamemnon a poli- 
 tician, Menelaus a cuckold, Ulysses a trickster, 
 Orestes an epileptic. For the tragic emotion of 
 horror he substitutes disgust; for the moral qualm 
 of his predecessors a shrinking of the flesh, a sense
 
 200 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of physical repugnance and nausea. His most dis- 
 tinctive dramatic effect results from a certain un- 
 canniness of character and motive. He is tempera- 
 mentally ambiguous, equivocal, evasive, shifty. He 
 is prone to blink the issue, to refuse to look the 
 tragic fact square in the face. His instinct is to 
 deny it, if possible, to juggle it away by some trick 
 of theatrical legerdemain; at all events to deprive 
 it of moral relevance and competency. 
 
 It is evident, for instance, that he can see no 
 sense, no reason of any kind in the sacrifice of 
 Iphigenia. It is merely odious to him as it was to 
 Racine centuries later. And yet what becomes of 
 the tragedy without it? There is no apparent viola- 
 tion of justice, nothing to raise a doubt or suggest 
 a suspicion; there is no qualm, no agony of question, 
 no mystery at once terrible and revelatory. It is 
 all perfectly simple, open, and morally intelligible. 
 The interest centers exclusively upon the dramatis 
 personce and their conflicting emotions. It is dis- 
 tinctively a modern, a psychological play. As con- 
 trasted with the ^Eschylean and Sophoclean tragedy 
 of principle, it is concerned solely with character 
 and its expression. 
 
 In the Electra, on the other hand, the absence of 
 a clear moral issue has resulted in what is mainly 
 a drama of incident. Orestes is nothing more or 
 less than a monster for his pains, Apollo a scoundrel 
 for instigating him to an unnatural murder; that 
 is all there is to it. Aside from the morbid psy- 
 chology incidental to the situation attention has 
 nothing to perch upon except the stratagem and 
 imposture by which ^Egisthus and Clytemnestra
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 201 
 
 are disposed of. The tragic problem has vanished 
 completely; there is nothing left but a particularly 
 harrowing and truculent melodrama. 
 
 As a result of his inability to make anything out 
 of his fables and his impatience with the interpre- 
 tations of others, Euripides is reduced, in the article 
 of theme, to the secondary role of critic. This is 
 his fundamental weakness as a playwright. It shows 
 itself in the loose construction, the faulty economy, 
 the feeble effect of his individual dramas taken each 
 as a whole, to say nothing of his faultfinding digres- 
 sions on the management of his predecessors. In 
 particular, since he sees no sense in his action as 
 such and has no inkling of its final cause or rationale, 
 it is only with the greatest difficulty that he can 
 bring a play to a close at all — only by some con- 
 ventional or arbitrary expedient, a dramatic cliche 
 or theatrical miracle. As a matter of fact, his 
 pieces seldom conclude; they terminate. Hence his 
 abuse of the deus ex machina, which in contradict- 
 ing or interrupting the logic of events, is to all intents 
 and purposes a nullity, as in Iphigenia at Aulis, or 
 else is effective only in dispelling the illusion, as 
 in Orestes. 
 
 The effect of all this activity was inevitably to 
 discredit and invalidate the value of the symbols 
 with which Euripides himself was obliged to work. 
 In transforming in this way the old mythology into 
 a new psychology, his treatment of his matter re- 
 sulted in dissolving its moral ideas and in emptying 
 it of its moral content. But inasmuch as he had 
 nothing else to build upon, he virtually knocked the 
 ground from under his own feet and was obliged
 
 202 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 to search his materials for other means of defraying 
 the expenses of a public performance. It is for this 
 reason that in turning his attention from the sense 
 of the transaction as a whole, he comes to make so 
 much of its constituent moments. Unable to com- 
 prehend the ebb and flow of the tides, he can only 
 admire the ebulliency and agitation of their surface. 
 In this manner he becomes the dramatist of pas- 
 sion. This is his merit and distinction. For this 
 kind of thing he was eminently fitted. Before he 
 created them, such figures as Phaedra and Medea 
 had never been dreamed of; and in some respects 
 they have never been surpassed from that day to this. 
 And yet this limitation — for limitation it is to see 
 nothing but the passions to which an action gives 
 rise and to miss its moral import as a whole — re- 
 sults in laying the principal dramatic stress upon 
 sentiment; it makes the pathetic the sole effect of 
 tragedy. 
 
 Even in the Hippolytus, which comes closest to 
 the standard of his predecessors, the interest cen- 
 ters in the hero's character even more than in his 
 behaviour. In a way it is almost a temperamental 
 problem which is propounded — and solved — in 
 the sense of Greek virtue. But the fact that it is 
 solved at all, is the important matter in this con- 
 nection, since it is the solution that gives tragedy 
 its moral significance. Hippolytus is responsible 
 for his own predicament. Attractive as his youthful 
 person may be and praiseworthy as is his attachment 
 to Artemis in itself, he is still the victim of his own 
 immoderation. Nevertheless, there is a modern 
 tinge to the story. Hippolytus is an appealing, a
 
 The Idea of Greek Tragedy 203 
 
 " sympathetic " hero in a manner in which neither 
 Agamemnon nor (Edipus nor Orestes nor any of his 
 predecessors, with the possible exception of Anti- 
 gone and Prometheus, were appealing. Further, 
 the duty that he follows is but his own inclination 
 in disguise. So warmly has he made himself a party 
 to the traditional feud between the two goddesses 
 that he can not refrain from taunting Aphrodite 
 as a fly-by-night. Nor is Artemis' threat to have 
 her revenge on Aphrodite at some future time by 
 the slaying of Adonis or otherwise, particularly 
 reassuring for the permanent establishment of right- 
 eousness. 
 
 'E7W yap auflis aXKov e£ tfxrjs xepbs 
 6s av fiaXicrd' ol (biXraTos Kvpy (3poTuv 
 robots afyvKTOLs rotade TLp.wpr]crop.aL. 
 
 Indeed, there is in the play not a little of the divine 
 wantonness for which its author was in the habit of 
 disparaging his deities. It too is marked by the 
 Euripidean rictus. 
 
 And the Bacchce, if it is anything like Euripides' 
 last word, only confirms, with something of the 
 solemnity of a testament, the melancholy story 
 which the Hippolytus would appear to have 
 interrupted but half-heartedly and for a moment. 
 If the play has any sense, it can mean nothing but 
 a divorce between divinity and justice, which JEs- 
 chylus and Sophocles had done their best to recon- 
 cile. It is nothing short of a repudiation of an over- 
 ruling providence. The gods are gods, he seems to 
 say, they do as they list; there is but scant virtue
 
 204 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 in them. In short, as I, Euripides, have always 
 contended, the order of the universe is not moral but 
 emotional. Such is, to be sure, Euripides' one wail- 
 ing refrain; but in the Bacchce he seems at last to 
 acquiesce, and not without complacency in a con- 
 scienceless fatality. 
 
 It is so that Euripides, the most imitated as the 
 most consonant of classic dramatists with later 
 tastes, serves as a kind of transition between the 
 serious drama of ancient and modern times. In his 
 case interest had already begun to shift from moral 
 to psychological problems, from the quality of 
 actions to the characters of men and the activities 
 of nature. It as though he had undertaken to fore- 
 cast the terminals toward which the modern drama 
 would move in its evolution, even to the amorphous 
 and indiscriminate drame into which tragedy proper 
 has finally degenerated, not to speak of the Shakes- 
 pearean tragedy of character, which he may have 
 influenced in a measure through Seneca, and the 
 Racinean tragedy of passion of which he was obvi- 
 ously the direct and immediate inspiration, while 
 the deformation of his tragedy as a genre was evi- 
 ently in the direction of late or modern comedy.
 
 RACINE 
 
 WHEN Racine began his career as a dramatist, 
 he found the general definition of French 
 tragedy already formulated by Corneille. However 
 the latter had come by his conception — whether 
 freely and of his own instance, or in yielding to the 
 pressure of official criticism, or what is even more 
 likely, in attempting to effect a compromise between 
 these two influences — the upshot of his labour was, 
 to all intents and purposes, the doctrine of the three 
 unities. All that remained for Racine was to adapt 
 himself to these prescriptions. Nor should the diffi- 
 culty of the task be underrated. It was one which 
 Corneille himself had failed to accomplish. Classic 
 by method and finally, perhaps, by conviction, he 
 was incurably romantic by temperament and inspira- 
 tion and was never wholly successful in conceiving 
 an action thoroughly agreeable with his own for- 
 mulae. There is something bungling and unhandy in 
 his efforts to cage a broad and rambing plot within 
 the narrow limits required by his theory; something 
 cramped and ungraceful about the result. In a 
 word, it would hardly be unjust to say, whatever 
 praise he may deserve for its discovery, that he 
 never understood the practical working of his own 
 invention ; he never altogether grasped the principles 
 
 205
 
 206 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of congruous simplicity characteristic of the classic 
 drama. 
 
 To illustrate this statement I need only refer to 
 Rodogune. The Cid would be an even better ex- 
 ample, though scarcely so fair an one, since it was 
 written while Corneille was still serving his appren- 
 ticeship. But to the citation of Rodogune for such 
 a purpose it is impossible to take exception since 
 Corneille himself expresses a decided preference for 
 it over all his preceding performances including both 
 the Cid and Cinna. And the significant matter is 
 the reason he assigns for his favouritism. Ab- 
 stractly, the frame work is of the utmost severity, 
 such as is ideally prescribed by the unities of time 
 and place, as Corneille insists that he is practising 
 them. But what he congratulates himself upon is 
 anything but the harmonious accommodation of 
 material to plan. Rather, he justifies his fondness 
 for the play by " the surprising incidents," which, 
 he assures us, are purely of his own " invention " 
 and " have never before been seen on the stage." To 
 be sure, he acknowledges that his " tenderness " for 
 this particular drama may be in the nature of a 
 parental partiality — it contains so much of him- 
 self; but the very fact that he feels it at all, is pretty 
 good evidence that he never quite realized the obli- 
 gations which his own profession of the unities im- 
 posed upon him, particularly with reference to the 
 selection of congruous subject-matter. And to this 
 charge he pleads guilty in so many words in the 
 Discours de la Tragedie: 
 
 " It is so unlikely that there should occur, either in 
 imagination or history, a quantity of transactions illus-
 
 Racine 207 
 
 trious and worthy of tragedy, whose deliberations and 
 effects can possibly be made to happen in one place and 
 in one day without doing some little violence to the com- 
 mon order of things, that I can not believe this sort of 
 violence altogether reprehensible, provided it does not 
 become quite impossible. There are admirable subjects 
 where it is impossible to avoid some such violence; and 
 a scrupulous author would deprive himself of an ex- 
 cellent chance of glory and the public of a good deal 
 of satisfaction, if he were too timid to stage subjects 
 of this sort for fear of being forced to make them pass 
 more quickly than probability permits. In such a case 
 I should advise him to prefix no time to his piece or any 
 determinate place for the action. The imagination of 
 the audience will be freer to follow the current of the 
 action, if it is not fixed by these marks, and it will never 
 perceive the precipitancy of events unless it is reminded 
 and made to take notice of them expressly." 
 
 Here, then, is his confession. Do the best you 
 can to crowd the incidents of your play into the 
 compass of a single day and dodge circumspectly 
 anything that may call the attention of the audi- 
 ence to the passage of dramatic time in the hope 
 that they may not notice the imposture. Every 
 Corneillean tragedy conforms more or less closely 
 to this general rule. I can not think of one in which 
 there is not some embarrassment in supposing that 
 the whole action elapses within twenty-four hours. 
 
 On this account it is not quite fair to represent 
 Racine as merely taking over Corneille's model. To 
 the formal theory and criticism of French tragedy, 
 it may be, he contributed little. But if drama is 
 a craft in any sense of the word, then the man who 
 took up tragedy at the point to which Corneille had
 
 208 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 brought it and carried it on to the point where Racine 
 left it, can hardly be said to have added little or 
 nothing to it. And the misconception arises, I be- 
 lieve, from a persistent confusion with regard to 
 one of the unities — to wit, the unity of action. 
 
 However it may be with the unities of time and 
 place, we are commonly assured that all drama, the 
 romantic not excepted, has one unity in common, 
 the unity of action; for such unity, it is speciously 
 added, is indispensable to a dramatic work of any 
 kind. That the statement is true in one sense, may 
 be granted; most statements are so in some sense 
 or other. But that the romantic drama possesses 
 unity of action in the same sense as the classic 
 drama — or even anything that would have been 
 recognized as a unity by Aristotle — such a position 
 can hardly be maintained with any great show of 
 plausibility. Indeed, so great is the difference in 
 kind that the use of the same term with reference 
 to the two dramas is misleading and bewildering in 
 the extreme. As well say that romantic tragedy 
 possesses unity of time and place because each in- 
 dividual scene is within itself continuous and 
 stationary. 
 
 The fact is that the romantic and the classic 
 actions are conceived in two quite different manners 
 and produce two quite distinct impressions. While 
 the latter, as everybody acknowledges, is concerned 
 only for the upshot or issue of a certain business or 
 transaction; the former is concerned equally for 
 its inception and development — for the soil in 
 which the tragic seed is planted and the climate in 
 which it is ripened even more than for the fruit
 
 Racine 209 
 
 which it finally bears. It is as though the romantic 
 playwright were absorbed in demonstrating how 
 such a result was brought about by successive steps; 
 while the classic playwright is interested only in the 
 nature and symptoms of the disease itself. Scrupu- 
 lous as is Sophocles in general, he is, to all appear- 
 ance, quite indifferent to the antecedent improb- 
 abilities of his (Edipus Tyr annus; evidently he 
 recognizes no obligation to account for his tragic 
 consequences. In the romantic action this tragic 
 matter is anatomized or parcelled out into its various 
 constituent incidents, circumstances, and details, 
 the which are all set forth severally and serially in 
 such a manner that the spectator gains his notion 
 of the tragedy as a whole by a retrospective and 
 discursive act of the imagination. In the classic 
 form the tragic affair is caught at its culmination 
 or crisis in such a way that it is made to yield all 
 it contains of human significance and purport. The 
 former is historical, the latter moral. The one views 
 its subject as a process or a becoming; the other as 
 a state or a being. If I were not afraid of being mis- 
 leading in my turn, I should insist upon this dis- 
 tinction and assert for the sake of contrast that in 
 the matter of procedure the one is dynamic or 
 kinetic, the other static — not that nothing happens 
 in the latter but that what does happen, happens 
 inside the situation. At all events, as far as names 
 are concerned, the romantic drama, from the point 
 of view of method, may safely be described as ana- 
 lytic, the classic as synthetic. 
 
 That these two ways of handling plot are, in 
 reality, so diverse as to merit different names, and
 
 210 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 that the unities of time and place are thoroughly 
 incompatible with the romantic conception, no 
 modern reader with a sense for Shakespeare and 
 Sophocles can deny, when actually put to it. On the 
 very surface of things it is impossible to think of 
 a moral fatality of tragic magnitude historically, 
 as originating, developing, and terminating all in 
 the course of a single day — even a more or less 
 elastic stage day — or to treat it historically, as 
 confined to such a period: the preparation alone 
 would be prohibitive. In Othello Shakespeare has 
 indeed tried something of the sort; but even here 
 he has taken pains to truncate his action uncom- 
 monly, beginning much farther in than is usual with 
 him. And still in this case the result, as far as 
 it is not purely romantic, is Corneillean — the action, 
 where it is not extended, is merely compressed and 
 makes no pretense to the congruous simplicity 
 demanded by the unities. In a word, it is still an- 
 alytic, no matter what artifice has been used to make 
 it appear foreshortened. And it is just Racine's 
 distinction to have recognized this fact — of the 
 essential incompatibilty of such an action with the 
 unities of time and place, a fact to which Corneille 
 was totally blind — and to have succeeded in work- 
 ing out a genuine unity of action in the strict sense 
 of the word — a synthetic action, that is, — which 
 would be comformable with the other unities — 
 though, indeed, it is a distinction that is usually 
 overlooked or misesteemed. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the notorious rivalry between 
 the two great poets, amounting to little less than 
 open hostility, ought to be quite enough in itself
 
 Racine 211 
 
 to discredit the commonplace that Racine was a 
 mere successor or continuator to Corneille. In 
 reality, Racine, while accepting Corneille's definition 
 of the drama in general terms, censures expressly 
 his management of at least two unities, those of time 
 and action, with severity. As Corneille was in the 
 habit of handling it, the unity of time was by his 
 own confession nothing but a barefaced trick or de- 
 ception — barefaced to the reader, however it might 
 appear to the spectator. It consisted, as he himself 
 explains, in ignoring the actual duration of events 
 in favour of an hypothetical stage-day of twenty- 
 four hours or thereabouts. Upon his choice and 
 organization of material it exerted little or no in- 
 fluence. For the playwright who is embarrassed 
 by the extent of his subject or by a plethora of inci- 
 dent he has no better advice, as has been seen, than 
 to refrain from mentioning the topic on the off 
 chance that the audience may fail to notice the con- 
 gestion of the action. In short, for all his flounder- 
 ing Corneille never succeeded in imagining, much 
 less in defining, a unity of action commensurate 
 with his ideal unities of time and place. The near- 
 est he comes to doing so is in his " unity of peril " ; 
 and how unsatisfactory that was he was himself the 
 first to acknowledge. To all intents and purposes his 
 action remains of the same dimensions as that of 
 the Spanish commedia; it is as diffuse and pro- 
 tracted, as wanting in concision and concentration: 
 — his efforts are directed solely toward disguising 
 its character. Apparently it never occurred to him 
 that the solution of the whole problem consisted 
 in such an ordonnance of his plot that the unities
 
 212 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of time and place should be involved in the nature 
 of the action itself and should result from it, in- 
 stead of being imposed upon it as a durance or con- 
 straint. As a matter of fact, the unities of time 
 and place, as far as they are valid at all, are only 
 functions of the unity of action. 
 
 At all events, it is directly against this method 
 of dramatic composition that Racine directs his 
 satire in replying to the detractors of his 
 Britannicus: 
 
 " What can be done," he asks, " to satisfy such 
 rigorous judges " as these umbrageous Corneil- 
 leans? And he answers: 
 
 " Nothing is easier in defiance of good sense. All you 
 have to do is to abandon naturalness for extravagance. 
 Instead of a simple action [italics mine] made up of a 
 modest amount of material, which takes place in a single 
 day and advances gradually to a conclusion sustained 
 only by the interests, sentiments, and passions of the 
 characters, you must cram this same action with a 
 great quantity of incidents which could not possibly 
 come to pass in less than a month, with a vast amount 
 of stage clap-trap the more amazing the more unlikely 
 it is, with a multitude of declamations wherein the actors 
 are made to say just the contrary of what they should." 
 
 And to the same effect in a familiar passage of 
 the preface to Berenice he insists upon this per- 
 tinent simplicity of action: 
 
 "Nothing matters much in tragedy save likelihood; 
 and what is the likelihood that there should happen in 
 a single day a multitude of things which could hardly 
 happen in several weeks? Some there are who think
 
 Racine 213 
 
 that this simplicity is a sign of small invention. They 
 fail to notice that on the contrary all invention consists 
 in making something out of nothing and that all this 
 great mass of incident has ever been the recourse of those 
 poets who have felt their genius too frail and scanty 
 to hold their audience for five acts by a simple action 
 [italics mine, again] supported by the violence of the 
 passions, the beauty of the sentiments, and the elegance 
 of the expression." 
 
 As compared with. Corneille's confessed weakness 
 for " surprising incidents," the like of which had 
 never before been seen on the stage, these expres- 
 sions would seem to be sufficiently explicit. It is 
 not the multitude or variety of incident which is 
 to furnish forth the perfect tragedy; it is passion, 
 sentiment, expression, which, so far from disagree- 
 ing with simplicity of action, in reality concur with 
 it; for here as everywhere it is upon this significant 
 simplicity of action that the whole weight and force 
 of Racine's authority is brought to bear. 
 
 As for the unity of place — it is in itself a minor 
 matter anyway. That is to say, the unity of place 
 offers no such difficulty in the problem of verisimi- 
 litude as does the unity of time. There is no pro- 
 hibitive improbability that an action of any ex- 
 tent, provided it be confined to the linear dimension, 
 should not occur in a single place. One may be 
 born, wed, and die in the same room, as far as that 
 goes — though it is impossible to imagine all these 
 events as taking place on the same day. It is for 
 this reason, perhaps, that Racine nominally con- 
 forms to Corneille's receipt in setting all his dramas 
 for a single room or apartment — with the excep-
 
 214 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tion of Phedre, which is set, in accordance with an 
 earlier recommendation of the same authority, for 
 a single " site." Nevertheless his own practice im- 
 plies a kind of criticism of Corneille's. With the 
 latter the single room or cabinet which served as 
 the local habitation of his drama was a stage fiction 
 no less truly than his dramatic day. Convention- 
 ally — though as a matter of fact it often shifts 
 from one spot to another — it was feigned to ad- 
 join the apartments of the principal characters and 
 to represent a kind of indifferent or neutral ground 
 where all parties to the action were equally at home, 
 and where etiquette and precedence were suspended 
 in the article of entrances and exits. Actually, it was 
 a mere theatrical spot, non-committally furnished 
 and decorated, where the actors met regardless of 
 verisimilitude, whenever the playwright needed 
 them, for the purpose of carrying on the play. In 
 the hands of Racine, however, this convention be- 
 comes more or less of a dramatic reality. There is 
 some difficulty, to be sure, in actualizing the " loca- 
 tions " of Phedre; but as a general thing, his action 
 does take place in the chamber where it is cast, 
 whether the harem of a sultan or the anteroom of 
 an emperor, the appearance of his characters in 
 that particular spot is reasonable, and a violation 
 of etiquette, if there is one, is always excused by the 
 logic of the situation. 
 
 Now, all this was possible — Racine was able 
 to make the unities of time and place a dramatic 
 reality instead of a theatrical fiction by means of 
 his own contribution to French tragedy — a con- 
 tribution which I have spoken of, properly or not,
 
 Racine 215 
 
 as the discovery of a genuine unity of action. But 
 no matter for the name; his originality consisted 
 in seeing — what is fairly obvious at present but 
 what at the time escaped the eye of the grand 
 Corneille — that a drama as a whole is determined 
 by the plot and that in order to have a certain kind 
 of tragedy it is necessary to begin with a certain 
 kind of action. Unlike Corneille he was sufficiently 
 in sympathy with the Greek spirit to perceive the 
 artificiality of the Corneillean tragedy with its arbi- 
 trary limitations of the plot as contrasted with the 
 intimate connection between the action and what 
 virtually amounted to the unities of time and place 
 in the best Athenian tragedy, and to recognize that 
 the success of the same unities in French and the 
 perfection of the type to which they belonged hinged 
 likewise upon the conception of an action which 
 should reduce the dimensions of tragedy to the pro- 
 portions of a crise or paroxysm. As Lemaitre points 
 out, he begins Britannicus twenty-four hours before 
 Nero's first crime; Berenice twenty- four hours be- 
 fore the heroine leaves Rome; and Andromaque 
 twenty-four hours before Pyrrhus decides in favour 
 of his captive. Only so was it possible to confine 
 the drama to a single room or even site and to a 
 single revolution of the sun. Tragedies do occur in 
 rooms and they occur of a sudden, no doubt; but 
 they are tragedies of emotion, not of incident. They 
 are affective tragedies — tragedies in which much is 
 felt and something is said, but in which compara- 
 tively little is done. They are tragedies in which 
 the characters suffer their fate — in a single word, 
 they are tragedies of passion and the characters are 
 patients.
 
 216 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 And this is, I fancy, the explanation of that Chris- 
 tian passivity ascribed to Racine's drama and re- 
 ferred by Sainte-Beuve to his Jansenist education. 
 While Corneille, it has been pointed out, remains 
 a pagan to the end, Racine manifests, as the saying 
 is, a genius naturally Christian. As compared with 
 the softness and infirmity of Racine's characters, 
 there is about Corneille's something a little extrav- 
 agant and demonic, even Titanic — 
 
 " Qu'il joigne a ses efforts le secours des enfers, 
 Je suis maistre de moy comme de l'univers." x 
 
 It is as though the former were concerned to point 
 in them the moral of original sin and efficient grace. 
 In themselves they are powerless for virtue — pup- 
 pets of temptation like Phedre, recipients of evil 
 suggestion, possedes — without force or initiation 
 of their own. That such is the effect of his drama 
 I have said myself; nor would I deny that his school- 
 ing at Port-Royal may have inclined his mind to 
 such an interpretation of life and humanity. But 
 I would insist that such an interpretation conforms 
 also to the formal obligations of his tragedy and is 
 not so very different after all from the tragic vision 
 of the Greeks. Whether they were naturally Jan- 
 senist is a question I should hardly care to raise. But 
 granted Racine's problem, he could scarcely have 
 found another solution of it so happy as that afforded 
 him by this tragedy of pathos and infirmity. 
 
 Nor is it without significance that so many of his 
 
 1 In quoting Corneille and Racine I use the spelling and 
 accentuation of Fournel's edition (Librairie des Bibliophiles) based 
 on the last editions published during the authors' lives.
 
 Racine 217 
 
 dramas bear the names of women — Andromaque, 
 Berenice, Iphigenie, Phedre, to say nothing of Esther 
 and Athalie, which lie outside of my cadre, as do 
 also Alexandre and Les Freres Ennemis. Of the ex- 
 ceptions — in Mithridate alone does an heroic figure 
 dominate the stage, though even he is in his period of 
 dej alliance and eclipse. As for Bajazet it had much 
 better been called after Roxane; while Britannicus, 
 too, is something of a misnomer for a play that cen- 
 ters upon the adolescent Nero. The truth is that 
 as a tragedy of passion the nature of Racine's drama 
 — like the depravity of Nero himself with its long 
 suppression and gestation, its violent spasm and its 
 quick collapse — is essentially feminine. 
 
 Obviously, such a drama is not without its inci- 
 dental technical advantages over and above its 
 simplifications of the unities. Its preparation, for 
 instance, is immaterial and subjective: it is all in- 
 ternal and mental, dependent upon the state of mind 
 of the characters ; and hence it requires little exposi- 
 tion save what is involved in the psychology of 
 the situation itself and developed pari passu with 
 the progress of the play. On the contrary, it is 
 noteworthy that one of the best evidences to the 
 artificiality of Corneille's dramatic construction is 
 furnished by the inherent difficulty of his exposition 
 — he complains of it himself — which makes pretty 
 nearly every one of his entrances into the matter 
 a tour de force. At the same time the Racinean 
 outbreak or denouement has the corresponding merit 
 of being as sudden and violent, like an explosion or 
 convulsion of nature. All that is necessary is to 
 apply a match to the train — to invent the one
 
 2i8 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 little contingency capable of precipitating the catas- 
 trophe. Consider how simple is the machinery of 
 Andromaque in comparison with that of Lear or 
 Hamlet; it is a mere release or trigger. There is 
 no difficulty in imagining such a tragedy as occurring 
 in a single day and in a single chamber wherever 
 the combustible happens to be stored. And it was 
 to his conception of a tragedy of this sort — as an 
 eruption of the most vehement of human passions — 
 that Racine, I repeat, owed his invention of a modern 
 action perfectly in keeping with the unities of time 
 and place. 
 
 In this connection it would be unpardonable to 
 omit a reference to what is after all the great supe- 
 riority of the classic drama. The supreme merit 
 of the simplified or synthetic plot which is the de- 
 termining feature of that drama, whether in the 
 hands of the Greeks or of Racine, consists in the 
 fact that it allows the dramatist time and opportun- 
 ity for the conception and development of a definite 
 and deliberate theme. " Le premier merite d'une 
 ceuvre dramatique," declares Vinet, " c'est qu'une 
 idee s'en degage nettement et vivement, c'est qu'on 
 puisse, comme un discours oratoire, la reduire a une 
 proposition." The great weakness of the romantic 
 drama has always and everywhere been its lack of 
 theme. And particularly is this statement true 
 of the Spanish commedia as practised by Calderon, 
 Lope de Vega, and Tirso de Molina. With the ex- 
 ception of a play or two like La Vida es Sueiio, 
 Spanish tragedy is almost themeless — unless for 
 the tiresome pundonor, and that is a motive rather 
 than a theme. Or if a romantic tragedy has hap-
 
 Racine 219 
 
 pened to catch a momentary glimpse of something 
 that might have served it for a theme, the pressure 
 of incident has been so irresistible as to jostle it 
 out of sight forthwith. In the best of instances it 
 remains rudimentary and inchoate, hardly rising 
 above the suggestion of a motive. There is no place 
 or leisure for it in the serried procession of events, 
 marching hurriedly by numerous degrees from a 
 distant inception to a remote issue. The interest is 
 distributed so impartially over the series that little 
 or no attention is left with which to exhaust the 
 sense of a single situation. As far as I can remem- 
 ber, there is nothing in romantic tragedy, for ex- 
 ample, to parallel the discussion over the corpse of 
 Ajax — the soliloquies of Hamlet, perhaps, ex- 
 cepted; and even they seem strangely clouded in 
 comparison. As for Corneille, he does marvellously 
 well in this respect for all his disadvantages, as 
 witness Pompee and Cinna. But naturally enough, 
 under the circumstances, it is in Racine, whose 
 characters of passion have little more to do than just 
 to exhaust the sense of their situation, that the 
 theme attains its fullest development. And it is one 
 of his aptitudes that this treatment should suit so 
 well with the particular passion that he picked as 
 the lever of his tragedy. 
 
 That, as compared with the Greeks, his conception 
 of passion was limited must be conceded, — 
 
 " C'est Venus toute entiere a sa proye attachee." 
 
 It would be idle to deny that his exclusive preoc- 
 cupation with one master passion — this virtual 
 identication, for dramatic purposes, of passion with
 
 220 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 sexual desire, gives his drama as a whole an air of 
 one-sidedness. But whether the theater be dedi- 
 cated to Cypris or Dionysus makes little difference; 
 the point is that though the Greeks used other 
 motives, they reached the same destination by the 
 same route. Their action is viewed in the same 
 manner, synthetically, as a spasm or fit of emotion; 
 it is by madness, fatuity, or some other brief and 
 violent distraction that the Greek denouement is 
 brought to pass. With them the tragic motive is a 
 passion too — a something suffered or endured, — 
 
 kird to. y'epya /jlov 
 ireTOvOoT' earl /jloXKov 77 dedpaKora. 
 
 And like Racine again they were obliged to think of 
 their hero's fatality as a kind of distemper or mal- 
 ady. It was not at random that Boileau with Racine 
 in mind enjoined the tragic poet, 
 
 " Et que Pamour, souvent de remors combattu, 
 Paroisse une foiblesse et non une vertu." 
 
 Such a treatment is involved in the notion of the 
 type, as the Greeks with their usual penetration 
 had not failed to discern. 
 
 Ibsen, too, in reviving the type — the synthetic, 
 as perhaps I may now be permitted to call it from 
 my description of the action — has been forced to 
 adopt the same dramatic tactics. Like Racine's his 
 is, in its own way, the tragedy of an apartment and 
 an obsession. Upon differences of tone and atmos- 
 phere it is needless to dwell; one has only to recall
 
 Racine 221 
 
 those ill-ventilated, stove-choked rooms of his, with 
 their frost-blistered windows over-looking the snow- 
 bound and sea-haunted moors and firths of the 
 inclement north. But to all intents and purposes the 
 mechanism is of the same sort — for all its moral 
 confusion the action is subject to the same simpli- 
 fication and the motive is conceived as an infirmity. 
 
 To return to Racine, one-sided as his partiality 
 for love may seem in the bulk, it still gives his 
 single pieces a wonderful intensity and power; for 
 after all there is no other human passion quite so 
 impetuous and headlong. And what it lacks of 
 itself in virulence it acquires by association with its 
 accomplice passion, jealousy. Hence his constant 
 employment of this second and subordinate motive 
 as a prick or goad to the former. The perfection 
 of his drama, therefore, consists in the complica- 
 tion of these two motives — love and jealousy. 
 Hence while Berenice serves well enough as a kind 
 of outline of his tragedy, its fulfilment is repre- 
 sented by Phhdre. 
 
 To take Berenice, for all its slenderness, as an 
 example of his bare idea, is, I suppose, fair enough, 
 since he himself in the preface seems to offer it as 
 such. In the words of Vinet, whose comments on 
 all this literature are uncommonly pertinent, 
 11 Berenice n'est pas le chef-d'oeuvre de Racine; 
 mais c'est ce qu'il a fait de plus racinien." That 
 the plot is meagre to the point of emaciation, may 
 be granted; but for that reason the scheme itself is 
 only the more salient. It consists obviously, in the 
 author's own words, of " a simple action " — hardly 
 more, to be exact, than a situation. It is a posture
 
 222 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 and a precarious one, terminating in a single ex- 
 pressive gesture of renunciation and regret: 
 
 " ' Tout est prest. On m'attend. Ne suivez point mes pas. 
 Pour la derniere fois, adieu, Seigneur.' 
 
 'Helas! '" 
 
 The development, then, will consist of three parts: 
 first an explanation or " exposition " of the relations 
 of the parties in confrontation; second, a demon- 
 stration of the emotional tensions and their potency; 
 and third, an exhibition of their release and an indi- 
 cation of the outcome. All that is necessary for a 
 representation of this sort is that the personages 
 should meet and speak together; and this they 
 may do as well in one room as in the universe at 
 large. As a matter of fact, I am not sure that the 
 impression is not intensified by the sense of con- 
 finement and constraint so produced, as it might be 
 with an explosion in a narrow space, and as it is 
 also to my mind by the absence of blood-letting at 
 the close. " It is unnecessary," says Racine, " that 
 a tragedy should be glutted with blood and death. 
 It is enough that the action should be noble, the 
 actors heroic, the passions excited; and that the 
 entire piece should be redolent of that majestic 
 grief which makes the pleasure of tragedy." And 
 there is, indeed, about the play a sort of appalling 
 tightness or constriction — binding the characters 
 like a fatal ligature — to which an act of violence 
 would be a relaxation and to which the piece is in- 
 debted for its individuality as compared with the 
 other dramas of Racine. It may not rise to the 
 highest effect of which tragedy is capable; but at
 
 Racine 223 
 
 its acme, when Berenice fancies that Titus is slip- 
 ping from her, it does rise to a very high pitch of 
 poetry: 
 
 " Pour jamais! Ah! Seigneur, songez-vous en vous-meme 
 Combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime? 
 Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous, 
 Seigneur, que tant de mers me separent de vous, 
 Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse 
 Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Berenice, 
 Sans que de tout le jour je puisse voir Titus." 
 
 Nevertheless, its merits and demerits aside, I 
 am proposing Berenice only as an illustration of the 
 author's bare idea. For the elaboration of the sketch 
 it is necessary to turn to PhMre. If one were 
 considering the " art " of Phedre without reference 
 to any particular thesis, it would be difficult to know 
 where to begin or end. Certainly, one could hardly 
 refrain from expatiating upon the delicacy and 
 firmness of drawing in the characterization of the 
 heroine, 
 
 " La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae; " 
 
 the subtlety with which from the first she insinuates 
 herself, with all the morbid fascination of her moral 
 distemper and personal disorder, into the blood and 
 senses of the audience. The debut of all Racine's 
 heroines is tremendously effective — Monime's is a 
 good instance; but Phedre's is, in especial, insidious: 
 
 " N'allons point plus avant, demeurons, chere (Enone. 
 Je ne me soutiens plus, ma force m'abandonne; 
 Mes yeux sont eblouis du jour que je revoy, 
 Et mes genoux tremblans se derobent sous moy . . .
 
 224 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Que ces vains ornemens, que ces voiles me pesent! 
 Quelle importune main, en formant tous ces nceuds, 
 A pris soin sur mon front d'assembler mes cheveux? 
 Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire a me nuire . . . 
 Noble et brillant auteur d'une triste famille, 
 Toy dont ma mere osoit se vanter d'estre fille, 
 Qui peut-estre rougis du trouble ou tu me vois, 
 Soleil, je te viens voir pour la derniere fois! " 
 
 Nor would a critic at large be likely to overlook 
 the knowingness of Hippolyte's " psychology " or 
 the propriety of his preferences — only a novice in 
 love would have had eyes for Aricie when Phedre 
 was by — nor would begrudge a word or two for 
 Aricie herself, " la belle raisonneuse " of the salons, 
 who takes love to be some kind of syllogism. But 
 such matters and others like them deserve more than 
 passing mention; and in view of my immediate 
 subject I can dwell only upon what is indicative of 
 Racine's fundamental reduction of the tragic motive 
 to a passion in the primary sense of the word. From 
 this point of view it is Phedre's passivity, her incapa- 
 bility of self-determination that is significant both 
 for this one play and for Racine's entire theatre 
 in general. It is this impotence which has won her 
 the doubtful distinction, already mentioned, of being 
 cited as an illustration of Augustinian theology. 
 But, however that may be, the characteristic trait 
 of Racinean tragedy is unmistakable in this, its 
 extreme instance. Phedre is not merely a sufferer 
 and a patient; hers is the debility of innate deprav- 
 ity, and invalided and graceless as she is, her hapless 
 soul is the prey of the whole passionate intrigue
 
 Racine 225 
 
 to which she is exposed. Hence her drama is the 
 pendant and complement to that of the more limited 
 and stubborn Berenice, whose Hebraism stands her 
 in good stead at her hour of trial. 
 
 In harmony with this difference of character the 
 motive of Berenice is simple and uncomplicated; it 
 is the Racinean interpretation, sponsored by Boileau, 
 of love as a passion or infirmity. By this one malady 
 alone all the characters in common are afflicted; 
 Antiochus himself is no more than a backing or foil 
 to Titus and Berenice. The intensity of interest is 
 due, not to a conflict or conspiracy of passions, but 
 to the strangulation of this one passion by circum- 
 stances. The play consists wholly of the fluctuations 
 of this same passion between hope and disappoint- 
 ment and its final settlement upon resignation. In 
 Phedre, on the other hand, this single passion, while 
 it is still agitated by its fluctuations and before it 
 has settled down either to resignation or to despair, 
 is exasperated by the goadings of jealousy — a 
 motive virtually absent from Berenice, if we except 
 a brief impersonal resentment at the meddling of 
 circumstances, for jealousy as such is not in Bere- 
 nice's character or in Titus' situation — there is too 
 much of the prude in the former, too much of the 
 grand seigneur in the latter; while Antiochus is too 
 tame to be subject to it. But in Phedre, if love is 
 the emotional protagonist of the drama, jealousy 
 is the deuteragonist. Nor is this all; there is a 
 tritagonist also. In Phedre's situation love is not 
 merely an infirmity, it is a crime and an impiety. 
 And in the devastation of her ineffectual spirit the 
 outrages of love and jealousy are fatally abetted by
 
 226 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 remorse. Such is the complicity of passions 
 which instigates the emotional transport of the 
 tragedy — one of the finest I believe in dramatic 
 literature, as Phedre is baited alternately by the 
 taunts of one and another. 
 
 " Phedre 
 
 " ' lis s'aiment ! Par quel charme ont-ils trompe mes 
 yeux? 
 Comment se sont-ils veus? depuis quand? dans quels 
 
 lieux? 
 Tu le scavois: pourquoy me lassois-tu seduire? 
 De leur furtive ardeur ne pouvois-tu m'instuire? 
 Les a-t-on veu souvent se parler, se chercher? 
 Dans le fond des forests alloient-ils se cacher? 
 Helas! ils se voyoient avec pleine license: 
 Le Ciel de leurs soupirs approuvoit l'innocence; 
 Ils suivoient sans remords leur penchant amoureux; 
 Tous les jours se levoient clairs et sereins pour eux! 
 Et moy, triste rebut de la nature entiere, 
 Je me cachois au jour, je fuyois la lumiere . . .' 
 
 " CEnone 
 
 " ' Quel fruit recevront-ils de leurs vaines amours? 
 Ils ne se verront plus.' 
 
 " Phedre 
 
 " ' Ils s : aimeront toujours. . . . 
 Miserable! Et je vis! et jet soutiens le veue 
 De ce sacre Soleil dont je suis descendue! 
 J'ay pour ayeul la pere et le maistre des dieux; 
 Le ciel, tout l'univers est plein de mes ayeux: 
 Ou me cacher? Fuyons dans la nuit infernale. 
 Mais que dis-je? Mon pere y tient l'urne fatale; 
 Le Sort, dit-on, l'a mise en ses severes mains. 
 Minos juge aux enfers tous les pales humains.' "
 
 Racine 227 
 
 This is the kind of thing that Racine is really cap- 
 able of: it is not only great tragedy, it is great 
 poetry; and it needs no commentary of mine by 
 way of reinforcement. 
 
 In conclusion, I would not be understood to 
 imply that Racine's entire drama squares in every 
 respect with the lines of Berenice and Phedre. Of 
 these two plays the one is too schematic, the other 
 too consummate to be thoroughly representative. 
 One does not repeat a Phedre or a Berenice — 
 though for quite different reasons. But for all that, 
 they define the type. They exhibit — all the more dis- 
 tinctly, if anything, for being exceptional in detail — 
 the characteristic originality which I have been try- 
 ing to vindicate for their author. They declare 
 that simple or synthetic action, the discovery or 
 invention of which converted the serious drama of 
 Louis XIV from an artifice and made a modern 
 classic tragedy possible for once. And they reveal 
 the means whereby Racine accomplished this result 
 by treating the plot as a crise of passion — typically, 
 of love and jealousy — of which the characters were 
 patients or sufferers, so harmonizing his action with 
 the " unities " of time and place, which the criti- 
 cism of the Academy and the example of Corneille 
 had fastened upon his stage. 
 
 To be sure, his technical procedure was not that 
 of the Greeks. The latter, by the force of circum- 
 stances of which the choric origin of their tragedy 
 was undoubtedly the most influential, had developed 
 out of the natural limitations of their action a con- 
 gruous simplicity of treatment, from which the prag- 
 matic criticism of the Renaissance had formulated
 
 228 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the unities of time and place. Racine, in the pres- 
 ence of these canons, had found himself confronted 
 with the problem of restoring, to a literature tumid 
 with romantic elements, the simplicity in which it 
 was wanting, by disengaging from the miscellaneous 
 mass a unity of action to correspond with the con- 
 ventions of his time. This was his contribution. 
 And I have no hesitation in calling it original, and 
 the drama to which he successfully appropriated it 
 classic, though to that tragedy I shall have certain 
 moral reservations to make a little later. 
 
 In the meanwhile, it will not be amiss to devote 
 a few words to the subject of his versification — or 
 more exactly, his dramatic style, for as a foreigner 
 I do not feel myself competent to criticize the jacture 
 of his verses. And here, again, though his original- 
 ity may not be so vital and important as in the case 
 of his innovations upon the dramatic structure of his 
 immediate predecessor, still it is not to be overlooked 
 or neglected. Now, dramatic poetry, naturally, is 
 confined to the business of drama. And drama, as 
 far as it expresses itself in language — that is, as 
 far as it is a matter of poetry at all — expresses itself 
 in dialogue — or exceptionally, in soliloquy. But 
 dialogue, while always seeking something of the 
 illusion of speech, will draw its individuality from 
 the situation which calls it forth. Typically, the 
 Corneillean situation in its significant scenes was 
 essentially a disputation, wherein each character 
 represented his own thesis and strove to convince or 
 argue down his respondent or respondents, as may be 
 seen by the scenario of Polyeucte. Hence the charac- 
 teristic temper of Corneille's dramatic style is orator-
 
 Racine 229 
 
 ical and its most elevated note is that of eloquence. 
 As a matter of course, no tragedy in its serious mo- 
 ments — and Racine's is naturally no exception — 
 can afford to be less than eloquent at the least, or 
 it would sink to ordinary conversation and prose. 
 But the peculiarity of Corneille is that he is so 
 exclusively eloquent in his loftiest reaches, so seldom 
 or never anything else. His political orations are 
 concededly the best things he does. How greatly 
 they were admired, how compelling their vogue is 
 shown by the fact that Racine has executed one of 
 the most prominent scenes of his Mithridate in the 
 same taste. And while such passages are not those 
 that stick most tenaciously in my memory, even 
 those that do are in the same vein : 
 
 " La vie est peu de chose; et tot ou tard qu'importe 
 Qu'un traitre me l'arrache, ou que 1'age l'importe? 
 Nous mourons a toute heure; et dans le plus doux sort 
 Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort." 
 
 Good lines; but their excellence is the excellence 
 of eloquence. Like all Corneille's best they are 
 perceptibly declamatory: 
 
 " Nerine 
 
 " ' Forcez l'aveuglement dont vous etes seduite, 
 Pour voir en quel etat le sort vous a reduite. 
 Vostre pais vous hait, vostre epoux est sans foy, 
 Dans un si grand revers, que vous reste-t'il? ' 
 
 " Medee 
 
 " ' Moy.' "
 
 230 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Conceivably, however, there is room for something 
 else even in the most serious drama, as we who are 
 the heirs of Shakespeare need hardly be told. Not 
 that Shakespeare himself despised the embellish- 
 ments of elocution. Such commonplaces as Antony's 
 harangue over the body of Caesar and Portia's apos- 
 trophe to mercy witness clearly enough to the 
 contrary. But then Shakespeare had no prejudices 
 against doggerel or balderdash either. Everything 
 was grist that came to his mill with the result that 
 he had the widest range of expression that ever was, 
 so that pretty nearly every variety of dramatic 
 style may be illustrated by his example. And while 
 Racine's scale is much more limited than his, as it 
 is bound to be in many cases by the different logic 
 of their genres so that comparison is illegitimate; 
 still Racine's reach is much more comprehensive 
 than Corneille's and demonstrates much more 
 favourably, just as does the former's conception of 
 the action, the possibilities of the types with which 
 the two were dealing. 
 
 If now we place eloquence at one pole of the gen- 
 uinely poetic tragedy, then at the other terminal we 
 must obviously set up lyricism, a lyricism adapted 
 — paradoxical as it may seem at first sight — to 
 the uses of the drama and adjusted to the nature 
 of the situation. The word lyricism, I should per- 
 haps add, I use in its fundamental sense to denote 
 the essential quality of lyric poetry and without 
 recognition of the rather derogatory connotation it 
 has acquired recently from reactionary French crit- 
 icism. But lyric expression is the result of intense 
 personal absorption; hence it would appear wholly
 
 Racine 231 
 
 incompatible with the gregariousness of drama, ex- 
 cept for the more or less anomalous soliloquy. From 
 the nature of the case, then, it can occur in non- 
 choric tragedy only at those rarer intervals when 
 a character is rapt beyond the consciousness of his 
 neighbours and his immediate surroundings either by 
 recollection or by extreme excitement. And for the 
 sake of clearness I will illustrate both of these cases 
 by Shakespeare. Of the former variety Marcellus' 
 speech in Hamlet after the disappearance of the 
 ghost is a good instance: 
 
 " It faded on the crowing of the cock. 
 Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes 
 Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, 
 The bird of dawning singeth all night long: 
 And then, they say, no spirit dares walk abroad; 
 The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, 
 No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, 
 So hallow'd and so gracious is the time." 
 
 This is a lovely example of the dramatic lyricism 
 of recollection. While the speech of Claudio, in 
 Measure for Measure, on what he fancies to be the 
 eve of his execution, though in another key alto- 
 gether, is an equally good example of the dramatic 
 lyricism of extreme excitement: 
 
 " Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; 
 To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; 
 This visible warm motion to become 
 A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit 
 To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
 
 232 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 The pendant world; or to be — worse than worst — 
 Of those that lawless and incertain thought 
 Imagine howling." 
 
 Such is a fair sample of the kind of lyricism pro- 
 duced and legitimatized dramatically by a sudden 
 or violent excitement — in this case the dread of 
 death. 
 
 Now, the characteristics of these two influences — 
 of recollection and excitement both, the one induced 
 by reaction, the other by shock — coalesce and run 
 together inseparably in passion of the Racinean 
 type — which with one and the same motion pro- 
 vokes the spirit of the patient and throws it back 
 upon itself. Just as the expression of elevated am- 
 bition is naturally oratorical, that of love is naturally 
 lyrical. For this reason the " lyric cry," which is 
 almost wholly absent from Corneille, is audible 
 again and again on the lips of Racine's characters, 
 especially his heroines. It is possible that verses 
 as picturesque as the following may be matched 
 elsewhere in French tragedy of the time, though I 
 do not happen to recall any: 
 
 " Et la Crete fumant du sang du Minotaure," 
 
 or this: 
 
 " Ariane aux rochers constant ses injustices." 
 
 But in the passages that I have already quoted from 
 Berenice and Phedre the novelty is undeniable:
 
 Racine 233 
 
 " lis suivoient sans remords leur penchant amoureux; 
 Tous les jours se levoient, clairs et sereins pour eux! 
 Et moy, triste rebut de la nature entiere, 
 Je me cachois au jour, je fuyois la lumiere." 
 
 And it seems to me that there is a new note in 
 Monime's appeal to Xiphares at her debut in the 
 second scene of Mithridate: 
 
 " Seigneur, je viens a vous. Car enfin aujourd'hui 
 Si vous m'abandonnez, quel sera mon appuy? 
 Sans parens, sans amis, desolee et craintive, 
 Reine long-temps de nom, mais en effet captive, 
 Et veuve maintenant sans avoir eu d'espoux, 
 Seigneur, de mes malheurs ce sont la les plus doux." 
 
 It is not a purely lyric note, perhaps, and yet its 
 plaintive simplicity has very much the effect of 
 lyricism — at least of the applied lyricism of the 
 drama. But I can not hope to detect all Racine's 
 inflections, much less to illustrate them. I am satis- 
 fied to show that in introducing a certain lyric strain 
 into his tragedy he has provided it with something 
 of the dramatic relief of which the Greeks were 
 possessed by virtue of their chorus and of which 
 modern French tragedy was destitute until he 
 supplied it. 
 
 11 
 
 Such, it appears to me, are Racine's principal 
 services toward the revival of a classic tragedy in 
 modern times ; — the discovery of a congruous sim- 
 plicity of treatment by the segregation of a syn- 
 thetic or unitary action, and what is less momentous, 
 the restoration of dramatic relief by the application
 
 234 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of lyricism to tragic dialogue. With these subsidies 
 neo-classic tragedy reached its highest point of per- 
 fection. That it staggered presently and declined 
 is no detraction to its momentary excellence; in 
 that respect it was but equal in fate with its Attic 
 prototype. As for its most powerful supporter, 
 Racine, aside from his well-known intimacy with 
 Euripides, it would be absurd, in view of the merits 
 that I have just mentioned, to deny that his sense 
 for Greek drama was finer than Corneille's, who, 
 as a matter of fact, was never completely successful 
 in shaking himself free of Spanish and romantic 
 influence. And yet eager and sensitive though this 
 taste of Racine's was, there are certain aspects of 
 the Greek genius to which he is partially or wholly 
 blind. That any one with even a tincture of the 
 great Athenian tradition should find the invention of 
 Eriphile or Aricie a happy one, seems incredible — 
 though much may be forgiven Aricie as the mover of 
 Phedre's jealousy. In particular, however, he seems 
 never to have fathomed the profound moral signifi- 
 cance of the great Attic tragedians. Perhaps he was 
 misled by his very devotion to Euripides, who is 
 generally disdainful, if not oblivious, of the import 
 of the material out of which ^Eschylus and Sophocles 
 made so much. With Euripides, for example, Racine 
 can see no sense in such a theme as the sacrifice 
 of Iphigenia. " How shocking," he exclaims, " if 
 I had stained the stage with the murder of a person 
 so amiable and virtuous!" — a sentiment that corre- 
 sponds perfectly with the opinion of Euripides' 
 heroine, 
 
 naive-cu 5' 6s euxercu 
 daveiv. Kax&s irjv Kpeurcop y ko\ws davelv.
 
 Racine 235 
 
 But even on those rare occasions when Euripides 
 turns out to be a capable guide, Racine is not always 
 equal to following him, as is conspicuously the case 
 with Hippolytus. 
 
 In all Euripides' extant work, however, Hippo- 
 lytus is exceptional in being conceived most nearly 
 in the moral sense of his great predecessor, " the 
 mellow glory of the Attic stage." To be sure, Racine 
 owes a little something in this case to Seneca also; 
 but his debt to the latter is merely that of one crafts- 
 man to another, and touches the ordonnance rather 
 than the inspiration of the drama, which derives 
 from Euripides direct. A comparison, therefore, of 
 Ph&dre and Hippolytus should be a fair test of the 
 particulars in which Racine was insensible, as I 
 have affirmed, to the deeper significance of the origi- 
 nal classics. How thoroughly he — and not he 
 alone but others before him — misunderstood the 
 tragic logic of his original, he confesses naively in 
 his preface: 
 
 " As regards Hippolytus," he says, " I had noticed 
 among the ancients that Euripides was reproached with 
 having represented him as a philosopher exempt from 
 every imperfection — a circumstance which made the 
 death of this young prince a subject of indignation rather 
 than of pity. I have thought it necessary to give him 
 some infirmity which would make him slightly culpable 
 toward his father without impairing the magnanimity 
 with which he spares the honour of Phedre and allows 
 himself to be abused without accusing her. I call an 
 infirmity the passion which he suffers, in spite of him- 
 self, for Aricie, the daughter and sister of his father's 
 mortal enemies."
 
 236 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Need I call attention, in passing, to the use of 
 the terms infirmity and passion as confirming in 
 themselves that view of the Racinean tragedy which 
 I have been developing, a view which in so far I 
 think to be consistent with the Greek? But this 
 matter apart, it is well nigh impossible to misinter- 
 pret Euripides' intention more egregiously than does 
 this quotation. Hippolytus, " a philosopher exempt 
 from every imperfection " ! His own maker would 
 never recognize him. For if one thing is certain, from 
 a study not merely of Greek tragedy but of Greek 
 thought in general, it is that Euripides and every 
 member of his audience must have recognized the 
 protagonist of Hippolytus as criminal — not in the 
 old elemental ^Eschylean sense, or yet in the majes- 
 tic, civic Sophoclean wise, but criminal, nevertheless, 
 with respect to one of the most fundamental laws 
 for private man, tol irepl avdpcoirovs vofxifxa, one 
 grave enough to be inscribed above the temple of 
 the god at Delphi, the law of fxrjdev ayavor temper- 
 ance, which seems almost to cover and include the 
 two other great maxims of Greek wisdom, yv&Bi 
 aavrbv and kclt avdpuirov <f>povel, Know thyself 
 and Think as a mortal. A philosopher without 
 <Ta><f>po(Tvvri or prudence. What Greek would have 
 called such a mere mortal blameless? 
 
 Now, this difference of sentiment is decisive, not 
 only for the two plays under discussion, but also for 
 the ancient and modern point of view at large. And 
 the difference involves a double change of feeling — 
 one with regard to personal responsibility in general 
 and the other with regard to the virtue of temper- 
 ance more particularly. The fact is that the moderns
 
 Racine 237 
 
 have pretty well lost the sense for the moral qualities 
 of acts as such. Superficially, it seems curious that 
 with our brutal Hegelian worship of the fait accompli 
 it should be so. But this is the very point. If we 
 are willing to forgive success its most heinous 
 crimes, it is so because the deed itself appears to us 
 without decisive moral character of its own. And 
 if we are reluctant, on the contrary, to condemn the 
 well-meaning mischief-maker, it is so for much the 
 same reason. The attitude may be due wholly or 
 in part to our sentimentality. Our interest has come 
 to be ethic rather than moral; it has come to center 
 in the characters, tempers, and dispositions of men 
 and in conventions for accommodating and reconcil- 
 ing them, rather than in the great fundamental prin- 
 ciples of humanity — the ay pcnrTa KaacfraXr) 6euv 
 vofxi/jia. With this shift of attention to the ethic 
 as distinguished from the moral our final verdict is 
 swayed by the intention, for which alone we hold 
 ourselves answerable, while we have ceased to 
 acknowledge a like responsibility for our actions. 
 With Pilate we wash our hands and protest the 
 purity of our conscience. Our sympathies, like 
 Racine's, are with the well intentioned; and we 
 excuse the deed readily enough on the strength of 
 the motive. Of course, this is nothing but casuistry 
 pure and simple; it is nothing but a modern vari- 
 ation of the Jesuitical " direction of the intention," 
 whereby a man might be absolved of the murder of 
 his father provided only he killed him not with the 
 idea of committing assassination but merely of 
 securing his inheritance. But such is our modern 
 emotional reaction; and it has already begun to
 
 238 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 affect our administration of justice so called, which 
 a sane instinct of self-preservation has hitherto coun- 
 selled us to leave intact. And since literature and 
 especially tragedy is appreciated emotionally, it is 
 in such manner that we apply ourselves nowadays 
 to the appreciation of this kind of subject. 
 
 For the Greek, on the other hand, the act as such 
 was neither indifferent nor negligible — on the con- 
 trary it had a distinct moral quality in itself. It 
 was right or wrong, independently of intention, as it 
 did good or harm — that is, as it respected or vio- 
 lated the institution of the supreme human polity, 
 the ay pairr a vo/juna; 1 and as such its initiator was 
 responsible for it — he was wicked as it was evil, 
 innocent as it was just. His intention was his own 
 private affair — though it might serve to wheedle 
 the pity of the spectators or bystanders or even the 
 commiseration of the gods, as its theatrical repre- 
 sentation did in the case of the spectators. 
 
 Now, in a good many cases, it must be acknowl- 
 edged, there is a practical difficulty in deciding just 
 what is the moral quality of an act as such, regard- 
 less of motive. But it seemed fairly safe to assume 
 that those acts might be reckoned good which 
 brought happiness in their train, and contrariwise. 
 At least such a belief appears to be one of the 
 natural tenets of conscience. To be happy is so 
 evidently to have done well in life. In the words 
 of Aristotle " To 5'ev £rjv teal to ev -wpkrreiv 
 ravrov VTo^a.fJifiavovo'L ra3 evbaifjioveiv' Here 
 
 1 For this conception of a moral constitution superior to the 
 conventions of social ethics, an idea we appear to have lost, 
 see Xenophon's Memorabilia. IV, iv.
 
 Racine 239 
 
 is the whole story, with the exception of Plato's wise 
 thinking. To be sure, the standard of happiness or 
 well-being was likely to be low with the vulgar — 
 hardly more than worldly prosperity, which is not 
 much of a criterion either in ancient Attica or 
 modern America. And perhaps, it was this baseness 
 of ideal which led Euripides to criticize and even 
 condemn the old moral standard altogether, with 
 its identification of righteousness and well-being, of 
 wickedness and adversity, which constitutes Sopho- 
 cles' constant thesis — just as it was the general 
 degeneracy of public opinion on the same subject 
 which inspired Plato in his attempt to raise the ideal 
 by disassociating happiness from all material accom- 
 paniments whatever and by confining it to the con- 
 templation of the supreme good — an attempt which 
 ultimately drove him to his doctrine of suprasen- 
 sible ideas as the sole means of rescuing the eudae- 
 monistic truism from the dissolving criticism of 
 a Callicles or a Thrasymachus as well as of a 
 Euripides. 
 
 In the Hippolytus, however, Euripides does for 
 the nonce remain fairly loyal to the traditional be- 
 lief in the moral quality of actions as a determinant 
 of prosperity and misery. It is Hippolytus' con- 
 duct, not his motive, which renders him obnoxious 
 to divine as well as to poetic justice. The offense 
 which he has committed unthinkingly (with Racine 
 we should probably acquit him of ill doing) con- 
 sists in his exclusive and hence excessive cult of 
 Artemis to the neglect and disparagement of Aphro- 
 dite. Not that his devotion to Artemis is blame- 
 worthy in itself; but Aphrodite has her claims also.
 
 240 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 And it was the Greek notion, not that a man might 
 acquire merit and plead exemption for the others 
 by satisfying this or that claim, but that he should 
 satisfy all claims in their due and proper propor- 
 tion. In ^Eschylean and Sophoclean tragedy this 
 conception is axiomatic. The tragedy arises from 
 the protagonist's inability or unwillingness to satisfy 
 all just claims — in the great tragedies from his 
 inability to do so, as in Electra, Antigone, and 
 (Edipus. Naturally, the more august the claims 
 and the more conflicting and irreconcilable, the more 
 stupendous the tragedy. While the lesser trage- 
 dies, if I may speak of degrees of tragedy, turn, 
 not so much on the fatal contrarieties in the nature 
 of things, like traps to break the soul, as on those 
 inconsistencies of character in which the protagonist 
 seems less unable than unwilling to pay all his debts, 
 like Ajax by reason of hybris or like Hippolytus 
 himself by reason of anoKaaia or indiscipline. And 
 if nowadays we fail to recognize Hippolytus' fault, 
 it is because the obligation of sophrosyne or moder- 
 ation has lost its authority either wholly or in part, 
 just as is so often the case with one or another of the 
 conflicting claims of Greek tragedy — the law of 
 talion, for instance, which disputes with filial piety 
 the Electra and the Coephorce. 
 
 Nor is even the idea of sophrosyne an easy one 
 for the modern; even Plato devotes an entire dia- 
 logue to the discussion of it — inconclusively, ac- 
 cording to the critics. In this respect, however, I 
 can not agree with them, since the positions which 
 Plato preempts in the Charmides are those which 
 he finally occupies in the Republic. The only reason
 
 Racine 241 
 
 for their temporary relinquishment in the former 
 dialogue is the circumstance that the discussion has 
 involved certain assumptions — principally that of 
 the equivalence of happiness and meeting your obli- 
 gations — which he will not at the time consent to 
 have taken for granted, though he justifies them 
 later. Hence it is that I can not look upon Plato's 
 attempt at a definition as a failure. At least I can 
 give no better account of the matter; and what that 
 account implies is, in sum, that sophrosyne con- 
 sists in taking one's own measure as a man and 
 conforming to it — the virtue to know the measure 
 and to be moderate. Wherefore my earlier remark 
 that the maxim, p,y]dev ayav, or Nothing too much, 
 by which the Greek aphoristically translated the 
 idea, virtually absorbs the other two gnomes in which 
 Greek wisdom is epitomized, yvoodi aavrou and kclt' 
 avdpcoirov 4>povel — Know thyself and Think as 
 a mortal. In short, sophrosyne was much as I have 
 been expressing it, the recognition and satisfaction 
 of all just claims. And this virtue, in which Hip- 
 polytus was so sadly to seek, was the polar virtue 
 to the Greek. Mere mortification, asceticism, even 
 the excess or exaggeration of a single duty he would 
 not have understood as righteousness. Saintliness 
 in the sense of austerity is an oriental, not a Greek, 
 ideal. Such a character, if the latter could have 
 comprehended it at all, would have struck him as 
 unnatural, even monstrous. " '06 yap avdpwiriK'n 
 k<TTiv 17 TOLavrr]v avaiaQr\oia" so says Aristotle. 
 And he would have expected to see it draw the light- 
 ning, just as Euripides has represented it as doing. 
 For it is this immoderation on the part of Hippo-
 
 242 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 lytus in slighting the natural human affinities or 
 inclinations and in unsettling the balance of satis- 
 factions by discharging one set of duties exclusively 
 to the prejudice of all the others — it is this partial- 
 ity which is adjudged a criminal arrogance or hybris. 
 About his very chastity there is designedly some- 
 thing farouche and savage like that of his tutelary 
 divinity, the harrier of Actaeon. And it is this par- 
 tiality which brings him within the scope of Phaedra's 
 baleful influence. In this way is vindicated the in- 
 flexible justice presiding over the great tragedy of 
 the Greeks — for which reason I have said that 
 however it may be with Euripides in general, Hip- 
 polytus at least is in the great tradition. 
 
 All this is so clear that the wonder is how Racine 
 could have missed it. And yet little or nothing of 
 it appears in his Phedre. The compromise whereby 
 he seeks to excuse his hero's entanglement in the 
 coils of a penal process by endowing him with a 
 fancy for Aricie, is too trifling to take seriously. 
 It is Phedre's passion that inflames the play; and 
 any mere affection is bound to show pale and inef- 
 fectual in the blaze of such a conflagration. At best, 
 Hippolytus' attachment for Aricie may be a motive 
 as regards Phedre, who is sensitive in just that par- 
 ticular spot; but it is no term in his own sequence 
 of dramatic liabilities, his to 8l aXkrjXa, as Aristotle 
 would call it, for it does not appear that there is 
 any mesh, in the ancient sense, between his fate 
 and his tenderness for the daughter of a hostile 
 house. This is not the issue; and he is never called 
 to account on this score. On the contrary, so far 
 has Racine missed the point, that this very senti-
 
 Racine 243 
 
 ment for another woman — any woman would do 
 — which Racine imputes to him, does, as a matter 
 of fact, clear him altogether of the charge on which 
 he should by rights be sentenced and actually is 
 sentenced in the original version. The Hippolytus 
 of Racine has already paid his tribute to Venus and 
 no longer stands within her danger. Whether he is 
 guilty of filial impiety on the score of Aricie's an- 
 cestry and descent is another question than the one 
 Racine has discussed. His injection of such a mo- 
 tive into his preface is simply misleading. As things 
 are, the apprehension of Hippolytus by the fatal 
 snare is fortuitous and unintelligible. 1 In a word, 
 Hippolytus is not responsible for the plight in which 
 he finds himself. As a result, his tragedy is harrow- 
 ing but not edifying. This is not to say that his 
 character or his conduct is without its interest or its 
 significance, but merely that the drama lacks the 
 severe determinism which Euripides has known how 
 to impart to this one subject at least. 
 
 But the Phedre, it may be objected, is not Hippol- 
 ytus' tragedy at all; and its author has given us 
 to understand as much by the change of title. 
 Granted. Racine's theater is for the most part a 
 tragedie des jemmes; and it is not Phedre which is 
 the exception. But this concession only makes the 
 predicament worse. With Phedre in the leading 
 role it is without a problem, as with Hippolytus in 
 that part it is without a solution. I am still trying 
 to occupy the Greek point of view. That I myself 
 am no aesthete or aesthetician must be abundantly 
 
 1 Compare Arnauld's ejaculation, " Mais pourquoi a-t-il fait 
 Hippolyte amoureaux? " Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, t. VI, p. 130.
 
 244 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 evident by this time; a problem has no terrors for 
 me — nor yet a thesis or a theme. I am even 
 abandoned enough to believe that literature is all 
 the better for something of the sort, provided it is 
 humane and not economic or sociological or an- 
 thropological. And so I have the effrontery to re- 
 peat that with the substitution of Phedre for Hip- 
 polytus in the principal part the play is destitute 
 of problem, and being without a problem, is destitute 
 of thesis likewise. To be sure, there is a kind of 
 justice in Phedre's fate; but it is that obvious, 
 anticipated, matter-of-fact sort of justice to which 
 the conscience does not have to be reconciled. Her 
 guilt is as sensible as her sentence. She is a sinner 
 — the fascinating and sympathetic sinner with whom 
 a long course of modern literature has sufficiently 
 familiarized us. Her seduction is undeniable. But 
 she is plainly a dangerous woman, a jemme jatale; 
 and it is better that she should be put away. And 
 in this decision we acquiesce without difficulty. 
 There is no ambiguity in her lot, no misgiving in the 
 minds of her judges. 
 
 The only compunction that her lot arouses has 
 to do with the fate of her victim, Hippolytus; and 
 to that problem, it has been seen, no solution is 
 vouchsafed. In short, the logic of the tragedy is 
 of a thoroughly modern type, of which Macbeth 
 and Richard III are the readiest examples — the 
 tragedy of wickedness or depravity. And like all 
 tragedies of the type, it is a little awry. For what we 
 fail to notice in our preoccupation with such pro- 
 tagonists is the circumstance that the merited visit- 
 ation of their iniquities provides no satisfaction or
 
 Racine 245 
 
 compensation for the sufferings of their victims — 
 the endless procession of Duncans, Banquos, and 
 Lady Macduffs. It is they who rise, 
 
 " With twenty mortal murthers on their crowns," 
 
 in speechless expostulation with the ordering of their 
 destiny. What warrant can we produce for their 
 ills? Theirs is the tragedy — unrecognized and un- 
 riddled; for every tragedy is something of a mys- 
 tery as of a sacrament. No, such tragedies are out 
 of focus somehow; and the Greek with his habitual 
 tact avoided them. It is not Phedre's subtle and 
 pervasive corruption — that only proclaims her a 
 moral outlaw and debars her from tragic citizenship 
 altogether, as Aristotle explains clearly enough — 
 it is Hippolytus' waywardness which makes the 
 Greek subject: 
 
 Ov8ds n'ape<TK€L vvktl davixaaros deCbv. 
 
 To Euripides the woman is a malign influence, a 
 calamity to which Hippolytus' impudence exposes 
 him. And if in the case of Racine's heroine there 
 is a trail of fatality lying across her house, which 
 simulates the immanence of divinity after the Greek 
 fashion, 
 
 Ta yap eK irpOTepwv airXaKrjpaTa viv 
 
 > s' ' ' 
 irpos raao airayet, 
 
 it does little more, in reality, than give depth to the 
 tableau and perspective to the picture. It is physi- 
 ological — an heredity, not a dispensation; a trans-
 
 246 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 mitted taint rather than a suspended judgment 
 re-incurred for himself by every new successor to 
 the title. Its moral, as distinguished from its 
 aesthetic, effect would be, if anything, to raise a 
 doubt of her responsibilty and throw suspicion upon 
 the criminal rationale of her catastrophe. And while 
 it is hardly emphasized to that degree — being in- 
 tended, I suppose, toward holding the sympathy of 
 the audience a little more surely — still in the up- 
 shot, the whole affair, with respect to Phedre as 
 well as Hippolytus, comes in the modern version 
 to take on the appearance of an act of wantoness 
 on the part of Venus: 
 
 " Puis que Venus le veut, de ce sang deplorable 
 Je peris la derniere et la plus miserable." 
 
 Not that Racine's drama has no sense; far from it. 
 But it is not the sense of the antique. And if I 
 am perchance singular in preferring the thorough 
 consequence and conclusiveness of the latter's dia- 
 lectic; on the other hand, I believe that I am only 
 speaking in the spirit of my time when I add that 
 I prefer the former's interpretation of character for 
 its inherent momentousness and significance. In 
 spite of the dubiety and indecision of Racine's 
 Providence, I must confess that to me his Phedre is 
 more appealing than Euripides', not only in her 
 reticences and indiscretions but in that by virtue 
 of which they subsist — her own being. For after 
 all, how much richer the character of the former 
 than that of the latter! And the change of taste 
 or sentiment, if I am right in my diagnosis, is far
 
 Racine 247 
 
 from trivial; for it is inevitable that this enhance- 
 ment of personality, which is at the bottom of it, 
 should have exerted a tremendous influence upon 
 the modern treatment, not only of character itself, 
 but also of the issues and eventualities of the action. 
 
 In order to explain these consequences, however, 
 I must refer hurriedly to the intellectual structure 
 of tragedy as far as it furnishes a scaffolding for 
 the problem which is the peculiar concern of the 
 genre. Universally, tragedy would appear to in- 
 clude two components — the " fable," which rep- 
 resents the fact upon which it is founded, and the 
 " art," whereby this raw material is fashioned into 
 drama. As far as the subject-matter goes, the senti- 
 ment of tragedy seems to be aroused by the per- 
 ception, in some event or other, of a dissidence be- 
 tween the demands of conscience and the data of 
 experience — between our notion of justice or equity 
 and our knowledge of actuality. Obviously, this 
 dissidence must be a serious one — so serious, in- 
 deed, as to upset momentarily our feeling of moral 
 security — to trouble and perplex and even confound 
 for the time being our intelligence. This temporary 
 sense of queasy and vertiginous insecurity I would 
 call, with Aristotle's term catharsis in mind, the 
 tragic qualm. From what precedes it is evident that 
 the subject of tragedy involves a contretemps — or 
 as Aristotle puts it for his own stage, a metabasis — 
 and implies the agency of fortune. Any occurrence 
 which meets these conditions, does in a measure in- 
 spire the onlooker with the crude sentiment, and in 
 so far raises the question, of tragedy. 
 
 But such a state of consternation is intolerable —
 
 248 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 especially if it is prevalent, as happens particularly 
 whenever the tenure of life becomes generally pre- 
 carious — in seasons of public insecurity, for ex- 
 ample, in times of war or pestilence — conditions 
 under which or the recollection of which tragedy is 
 most likely to flourish. In the interests of sanity, 
 then, it is necessary that the reason should be rec- 
 onciled to existence and that the apprehensions to 
 which it is subjected by the perfidies of nature 
 should be composed and tranquillized. In other 
 words, if the observer is to be brought to acquiesce 
 in the shocking terminations of tragedy, he must 
 be made to find in the apparent miscarriage of jus- 
 tice which the dramatist has chosen for his theme 
 some solace of a sort for his own outraged sense of 
 propriety. This is the " art " of tragedy. Without 
 it there is only the representation of some harrow- 
 ing and inscrutable casuality. 
 
 Now, as a matter of course, the gravest of such 
 outrages occur in connection with the conflict of 
 good and evil on those occasions when the latter 
 seems to have won an unwarranted triumph over the 
 former to the detriment of the personal happiness 
 or well-being of its vanquished representatives. 
 Hence tragedy has ever sought pretty much to this 
 one kind of subject. It has always been moral and 
 eudasmonistic. And it has been greatest where its 
 preoccupation with this topic has been most exclu- 
 sive, as was the case with the Attic drama of the 
 great epoch. Among moderns the New Englander 
 has had something of the same conviction of moral 
 immanence which inspired ^Eschylus and Sophocles. 
 For him as for them the world was compact of good
 
 Racine 249 
 
 and evil; there was no room for moral indifference, 
 no neutral zone in his universe — nothing but " the 
 gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — 
 they alone with him alone." But his end was not 
 well-being but duty. And in this intent he was in- 
 vulnerable to adversity, the stage-manager of the 
 tragic scene. Nay, to the Puritan conscience with 
 its suspicion of fortune and her works, the very 
 name of tragedy was anathema. 
 
 To the Greek, however, with his moral and eudse- 
 monistic leanings — nor should his intellectual and 
 inquisitive temper be forgotten either — the problem 
 presented itself in some such guise as this. Why 
 did misery come to attach itself to a sort of action 
 naturally calculated to ensure happiness? I say 
 " why," not " how " advisedly; for unlike the 
 modern, he was not to be fobbed off with anything 
 less than a reason. In other words, with no discern- 
 ible difference as between two acts — or at least, 
 of two acts equally laudable as to purpose; why 
 should the one promote disaster and disgrace, the 
 other prosperity and repute? Or more narrowly 
 still, why in this particular instance, say, should a 
 certain design which might be predicted on general 
 principle and analogy to further the advantage of 
 its author — why should such a course of conduct, 
 on the contrary, plunge its pursuer into an abyss of 
 wretchedness and humiliation? How was such 
 seeming perversity of circumstance to be explained? 
 Such, I believe, was the riddle that ^Eschylus and 
 Sophocles set themselves to read. And they solved 
 it by the affirmation, tacit or explicit, of a cosmic 
 law of righteousness, as a trangression of which they
 
 250 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 accounted every such outward act a crime, reckoning 
 its frustration and disgrace a legitimate penalty of 
 wrong-doing. 
 
 Nor was this notion of a supra-mundane policing 
 of human activities singular to ^Eschylus and 
 Sophocles. To be sure, it had its scoffers like 
 Thrasymachus and Callicles, and its critics like 
 Euripides. But it was so obviously a matter of 
 course that the dramatist was safe in appealing to 
 it as the basis of his solution and in deducing the 
 necessary corollaries from it acceptably to his pub- 
 lic. In this way, by the identification of adversity 
 with guilt, he was in a position to explain the suffer- 
 ings of his protagonist by holding him responsible 
 for the misconduct (and notice how easily our own 
 language falls in with the same kind of reasoning) of 
 which they were supposed to be the consequences 
 at the same time that he was able to soften the 
 audience to the proper degree of indulgence for the 
 sufferer by representing his trangression as uncal- 
 culated and involuntary. But though as the victim 
 of a contretemps, he might well be regarded with a 
 moderate pity, still as a trangressor and a source of 
 impiety and pollution, he was an abomination and 
 an object of horror. Hence the complementary 
 emotions of pity and horror by which Aristotle de- 
 fines tragedy in exponents of the action. 
 
 With the modern conceit of personality and its 
 surpassing importance, however, such a resolution 
 of the contrarieties of fortune becomes impossible. 
 What is decisive in such an estimate of character 
 is purity of motive, not precision of conduct. " In- 
 firmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply guilt.
 
 Racine 251 
 
 They approach, or recede from the shades of that 
 dark alliance, in proportion to the probable motives 
 and propects of the offender and to the palliations, 
 known and secret, of the offense." Such, in the 
 heart-felt words of De Quincey at the confessional, 
 is approximately the modern and romantic doctrine 
 of responsibilty. Consistently with such a view 
 a formal contravention of prescription can not be 
 pleaded in extenuation of that loss of happiness 
 to which one is felt to be entitled by virtue of such 
 merit as consists with good intentions. That good 
 intentions alone are no guarantee of prosperity, how- 
 ever, is a depressing certainty of daily observation. 
 With the moral negligibility of conduct the center 
 of tragedy has begun to shift, and the old explana- 
 tion is thrown out of focus. And yet the radical 
 detestation of injustice persists unaltered — only it 
 is now impossible to palliate the miscarriage by con- 
 victing the sufferer of involuntary culpability; he 
 is exonerated by the sense of his personal worthiness. 
 To all appearance, virtue has simply lost the partie; 
 and there is nothing left for tragedy but to affix her 
 signature to the humiliating admission. 
 
 And yet there does remain one way of escaping 
 this recantation of our most earnest professions. 
 While conceding, as now seems unavoidable, that 
 there is but " one event to the righteous and the 
 wicked," the dramatist may still claim a spiritual 
 superiority for the former, not only in an equality 
 of fortune, but also in an inequality of fortune which 
 is all to the advantage of the latter. In other words, 
 he may still solicit and win approval for a certain 
 sort of character in the face of its material collapse.
 
 252 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 In this manner it is possible to restore that confi- 
 dence in the primacy of the individual conscience 
 by which the modern sets such store. In spite of 
 an ineptitude for affairs, an inadequacy to the situ- 
 ation which the ancient would have construed as 
 the infatuation of guilt, Hamlet, Othello, and Lear 
 are esteemed to have the nobler part for all their 
 calamities, as contrasted with the wholly despic- 
 able conspiracy to which each falls a victim. And 
 so this assertion of the sentimental preeminence of 
 an approved character, irrespective of its ends and 
 activities, has come — thanks to its conformity with 
 our modern, and perhaps I should add our Chris- 
 tian, prepossession — to form the resolution of 
 modern tragedy, of the neo-classic as well as the 
 romantic. 
 
 That such a resolution is emotional rather than 
 rational can not be disputed. All too obviously it 
 supplies no genuine solution of the mystery of good 
 and evil, happiness and misery which has vexed the 
 heart of man for so many centuries. It is but a 
 compromise at best; and as such it is an inherent 
 defect of modern tragedy. Nevertheless there are 
 two remarks to be made in extenuation. In the first 
 place, the immediate appeal of tragedy is emotional 
 any way; and such a reconciliation, though failing 
 to satisfy mature reflection, does at least offer tem- 
 porary alleviation of the heart-ache that accom- 
 panies the spectacle of such enormities as make the 
 subject-matter of tragedy. While further, since it 
 it is unreasonable to expect a thoroughly congruous 
 art of an age without consistency, it is only by some 
 such compromise that the dramatist can hope to
 
 Racine 253 
 
 mediate between the warring tendencies of our post- 
 renaissance mood. In an order purely physical, for 
 example, it is inconceivable that righteousness 
 should influence our material well-being in one way 
 or the other. Or else, if a man's fortunes are to be 
 taken as the index of his deserts, as antiquity was 
 prone to believe, then the protestations of his own 
 conscience are unreliable as against the evidences 
 of adversity. But either of these alternatives we 
 are loath to embrace. The former implies an in- 
 sensible determinism; the latter a moral causation. 
 And in our reluctance we are driven to make the 
 benefits and dignities of virtue, as of character, 
 largely subjective and intimate — an affair of senti- 
 ment pretty exclusively. 
 
 As a result of this expedient of reconciling the 
 heart, irrespective of the head, to the contingencies 
 of the denouement or catastrophe, there has ensued 
 a momentous change of attitude toward the protag- 
 onist. I speak of the denouement or catastrophe as 
 a contingency deliberately; for in this light we are 
 bound to consider it, ex hypothesi, on the strength 
 of its hideous disproportion with the presumptive 
 innocency of the victim. At least, since the " hero " 
 is no longer to be held to strict accountability for 
 his conduct to the extent of sharing impartially in 
 the obloquy of his misdeeds, there is no choice save 
 to call the catastrophe morally indifferent whatever 
 his instrumentality in its production. As Othello 
 and Hamlet are written, it is impossible to visit upon 
 the heads of the titular characters the full measure 
 of abhorrence proper to their infamies as such. 
 Taken in themselves, the crazing of Ophelia by the
 
 254 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 meditative Dane and the smothering of Desdemona 
 by the valiant Moor are not exploits particularly 
 creditable to their perpetrators. And yet in spite of 
 the egotistic squeamishness of the one and the jeal- 
 ous credulity of the other character, we are induced 
 to shift the blame from their shoulders to the in- 
 stigation of circumstance and the connivance of 
 opportunity — agencies admirably symbolized in the 
 Phedre, for instance, by the person of the nurse. 
 Herein, obviously, consists the utility of the 
 " villain " ; he lets the " hero " out. For notice that 
 with this gentry Sophocles and ^Eschylus, whose 
 protagonists bear, like (Edipus, the opprobrium of 
 their own mischief, have no traffic. And though 
 there are foreshadowings of the villain, in the pres- 
 ent acceptation of the word, in Euripides as a scape- 
 goat for some of the interesting adventuresses, like 
 Medea, for whom that author had such a particular 
 tenderness; yet the role owes its sinister prominence 
 to the exigencies of the sentimental reconciliation 
 and the modern tragedian's efforts to save his 
 hero's face at all odds — an effort in which he is 
 inevitably led to develop the ethical rather than the 
 moral possibilities of his action, treating it as rev- 
 elatory of the complexity and richness of the pro- 
 tagonist's temperament, which to our notion con- 
 stitutes its worth and value. 
 
 As a result of these conditions, then, the modern 
 protagonist or hero is invariably a " sympathetic " 
 character. If he were not — if he were to forfeit 
 the indulgence of the audience, he would lose what 
 standing he has and become identified with his own 
 performances. In that event, being as he is the
 
 Racine 255 
 
 source of irreparable injury to others no less than 
 to himself, the illusion of his merits would vanish 
 and his tragedy would turn into the exceptional 
 type of which I have already spoken as the tragedy 
 of depravity or turpitude, exemplified by Macbeth 
 and Richard III and of which, as it is anomalous, 
 I need speak no further in this connection. Or else, 
 the audience, deprived of their faith in his innate 
 nobility, even if they succeeded by a miracle of 
 subtlety in retaining a purely intellectual confidence 
 in his own conscientiousness despite the damning 
 evidence of his own misdoing, would remain unrec- 
 onciled to the hardship of his lot, and the tragedy 
 itself as " art " would be a signal failure. There are 
 no two ways about it: while the Greek protagonist 
 might be represented as simply infatuate, the una- 
 voidable outcome of the sentimental reconciliation 
 is the " sympathetic " protagonist. 
 
 I can not disguise that in all this there is more 
 than a trace of casuistry. But what then? Such 
 is modern sentiment, romantic even at its best and in 
 spite of itself; and since art must comply with the 
 convictions of its devotees, such is modern tragedy. 
 In contrast with the classic Greek it takes the hero 
 subjectively, as he is reflected in the mirror of self- 
 consciousness, and not objectively, as he would im- 
 press the dispassionate observer. It does not con- 
 sider him an example but an exception, unique and 
 individual. It is less concerned to bring him to trial 
 as the citizen of a moral polity whose constitution 
 he is under suspicion of having violated than to 
 plead in his behalf the privilege of an unnaturalized 
 sojourner in a strange land with whose institutions,
 
 256 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 customs, and manners he is unfamiliar and to whose 
 jurisdiction he is not properly subject. So patently 
 unadapted are Hamlet and Othello to their milieu 
 that it is rather naive to express surprise at the 
 havoc they play with it. In this respect modern 
 tragedy is uniformly confidential and biographical 
 — not common and public, not historical. It em- 
 bodies a distinct and hitherto unstudied variety of 
 the " pathetic fallacy." Consistently, it has ceased 
 little by little, notwithstanding its early deference 
 for tradition, to draw its material from generally 
 accessible and verifiable sources, and has taken 
 more and more to substituting invention for inter- 
 pretation. As far as the results go, it is not wholly 
 inexcusable to distrust the sincerity, if not the 
 legitimacy, of " private " tragedy altogther. For 
 once the dramatist has begun to rid himself of fidel- 
 ity to the record written or oral, there is nothing 
 to prevent him from abusing his audience's sym- 
 pathy " at discretion " to the confusion of all moral 
 values whatsoever. Indeed, he is bound by the 
 nature of the case to do a certain amount of violence 
 to the judgment of his audience. Euripides himself 
 has shown how the trick may be turned in his 
 Medea, and Racine has not been slow to imitate 
 him in Phedre. I will not go so far as to say that 
 Racine has passed the bounds permissible to his 
 genre, but I can not deny that he has pushed our 
 indulgence for his heroine to something of an ex- 
 treme. And if the " sympathetic " hero is capable 
 of such license while still subject to the authority 
 of legend or notorious fable, what limit to his ex- 
 cesses when these last fetters are finally removed?
 
 Racine 257 
 
 The answer, I suspect, is Ibsen. How many of the 
 tremendous figures that dominated the Attic stage 
 in the heyday of its splendour are " sympathetic " ? 
 Not Orestes, nor Agamemnon, nor (Edipus Tyran- 
 nus, nor Electra, nor Clytemnestra. Prometheus 
 and Antigone? Or do they only seem so to us? 
 For it is significant that these two pretty nearly ex- 
 haust the unqualified enthusiasm of the modern for 
 ancient tragedy. I omit to mention Philoctetes and 
 (Edipus Coloneus because the " happy " tragedy 
 in which they figure is as anomalous to our experi- 
 ence as the tragedy of evil or turpitude was to that 
 of the Greek, and hence lends itself as little to com- 
 parison. But if Antigone and Prometheus were, 
 in reality, " sympathetic " characters originally, they 
 at least were so by disposition, not by theatrical 
 necessity, as is the case with their younger col- 
 leagues. As for Hamlet, I sometimes wonder, for 
 example, whether he was actually so " sympathetic " 
 as he is painted. The remark is fatuous, of course, 
 since Hamlet is just what Shakespeare has made 
 him, no more, no less. But it serves to illustrate the 
 point, if the point is worth making at all, since it 
 assumes an effect entirely at variance with Aris- 
 totle's first-hand impression. On the authority of 
 this one deponent, whose competence I fancy no 
 one will question, the Greek protagonist, while lay- 
 ing claim to the pity of the audience for his reverses, 
 was effectually disqualified as a " sympathetic " 
 character by the horror that he excited by his mis- 
 deeds. The evidence is conclusive: the " sympa- 
 thetic " protagonist, with the sentimental reconcil- 
 iation of which he is an outcome, is a persistent
 
 258 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 characteristic of modern, in contradistinction from 
 ancient tragedy. 
 
 With these preliminaries disposed of, it is pos- 
 sible to examine the specific physiognomy of 
 Racine's characters a little more closely. From this 
 brief survey I need hardly apologize for omitting 
 Alexandre and La Theba'idc as well as Esther; the 
 reasons for doing so are sufficiently obvious. Atha- 
 lie, too, well worth consideration as it is in itself, 
 seems to lie outside of its author's professional 
 career. Racine's tragedy I have already called a 
 tragedie des jemmes. It is not merely that so many 
 of his title roles are filled by women — Andromaque, 
 Berenice, Iphigenie. Phedre; yes, and Athalie, for 
 that matter; or that women so uniformly preempt 
 the center of his stage. It is that women come so 
 near to exhausting his interest and invention. 
 Britannkus, to be sure, looks like an exception; 
 but even in this case, though Junie may not be 
 thoroughly engrossing on her own account, she is 
 at least responsible for springing the trap. While 
 as for Bajazet and Mithridate, there can be no doubt 
 that it is Roxane who animates the former as it 
 is Monime who inspires the latter. 
 
 In revenge, his typical hero is hardly more than 
 an idealized courtier — not unhandsome, it is to 
 be presumed, and gallant, but rather insipid for a 
 palate accustomed to the gusto of Shakespeare's 
 male parts — the Wertherean Britannicus; the com- 
 plaisant Bajazet; Achille, le beau sabreur; Hip- 
 polyte, the petit-maitrc. Even Titus has about him 
 a little something of the operatic potentate:
 
 Racine 259 
 
 " Cette poupre, cet or, que rehaussoit sa gloire, 
 Et ces lauriers encor temoins de sa victoire." 
 
 And while it is a flight of the fancy to think of 
 substituting one for another, still they are all 
 pretty much of a piece. No doubt, there is a kind 
 of disarming candour about Hippolyte — he is so 
 clearly no match for all these designing women, 
 not the least dangerous of whom is the nurse — 
 which sets him a little apart; as is also true of the 
 frank impetuosity of the young Achille. But Ba- 
 jazet, or even Britannicus, when stripped of his 
 theatrical trappings, is little better than a self- 
 confessed futility. 
 
 Perhaps it is too much to expect of an author any 
 way that he should be able to keep the object of a 
 woman's infatuation from looking a little fatuous 
 himself. But to these statements one reservation 
 at least must be made in favour of that wily and 
 bellicose old barbarian, Mithridate, the most virile 
 full-length that Racine has drawn; for Nero's vil- 
 lainy, as I have already noticed, is hardly a mascu- 
 line villainy as yet — it retains too much of the 
 effeminacy of adolescence. Aside from the domin- 
 ating and sinister figure of Mithridate, the strongest- 
 featured of all the men are Orestes and Pyrrhus; 
 and it is remarkable that until the next to the last 
 scene of the third act Andromaque is comedy — 
 partly, I suppose, on account of the fact that it is 
 something of a coup d'essai, but mainly, because 
 of the accentuated characterization of these two 
 principals, whom even the passion that makes the 
 women tragic, only renders a little ridiculous. At
 
 260 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 all events, Racine never tried the experiment again; 
 and from this evidence — negative, I admit — is it 
 fanciful to conclude that he distrusted his ability to 
 individualize his leading men very strongly without 
 caricature and comedy? 
 
 To justify the propriety of such forbearance on 
 his part a brief digression is necessary. It is no 
 secret that the more academic French critics have 
 associated the perfection of their tragedy with the 
 retrenchment from serious drama of two elements 
 — romance and comedy. With Racine's simplifi- 
 cation of the action, the plot as such was cleared of 
 the last shred of the romance still so pronounced 
 in the Cid and Rodogune, and indeed, everywhere 
 in Corneille. And if the result is yet to some ex- 
 tent romantic by reason of the sentimental resolu- 
 tion, the blemish is due to the circumstance that 
 even Racine is a modern, and the modern is incur- 
 ably romantic by position. After all that has hap- 
 pened in the last two thousand years it is idle to 
 require a perfectly clean conscience even of those 
 who have done their best to expiate the sins of their 
 fathers and to purge their souls of the Asiatic and the 
 mediaeval. As for the comic element, that had 
 ceased to be much of an impediment to tragedy 
 already. And yet while the playwright of Louis 
 XIV's time was in no great danger of losing his 
 footing altogether, nevertheless he did slip occasion- 
 ally, even though he might save himself from actu- 
 ally falling. At least, he has here and there shaken 
 his reader's confidence in his infallibility, like Ra- 
 cine himself in Andromaque and Moliere in Le Mis- 
 anthrope. To be sure, the outcome is unclouded;
 
 Racine 261 
 
 the final impression of Andromaque is unambigu- 
 ously tragic, as that of Le Misanthrope is comic. 
 But there are moments of dubiety, where the judg- 
 ment is befuddled — just how badly the reader 
 must decide for himself. And then, aside from these 
 domestic difficulties, whose seriousness it is hard 
 for an outsider to estimate exactly — the genre 
 tranche has been an embarrassment to the French- 
 man in another fashion. On the one hand, it has 
 troubled his appreciation of " mixed " tragedy, 
 like the Shakespearean, which partly on this ac- 
 count Voltaire includes in a common damnation 
 with the Greek as hopelessly barbarous. And on 
 the other hand, it has obstructed the understanding 
 of " pure " tragedy, like Racine's, on the part of 
 the English, who are inclined to resent the abate- 
 ment of confusion as a violence to nature and 
 another arbitrary and crippling convention. If I 
 embark, then, upon a hasty discussion of the rela- 
 tions between tragedy and comedy, I do so in the 
 hope of completing the definition of pure tragedy, 
 since I have already taken account of the 
 other formally objectionable element, romance, in 
 explaining the nature of the simple or synthetic 
 action. 
 
 In such an inquiry into the applications of com- 
 edy, sketchy though that inquiry may be, it is only 
 fair that we should place ourselves for the time 
 being at the French point of view. If the French 
 critic objects to the admixture of comedy with his 
 tragedy, it is obviously neither Shakespearean nor 
 Aristophanic comedy that he has in mind, but com- 
 edy after his own kind. Of this kind Moliere is
 
 262 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the natural representative; and accordingly to his 
 line the following remarks are roughly hewn. 
 
 Considered in this light, the distinction between 
 comic and tragic is not particularly difficult. It is 
 mainly a matter of mood. Just as the ancient 
 artificer might turn his fabrics into a tragic or a 
 comic mask at will, so the dramatist may give 
 a situation a tragic or a comic turn indifferently. 
 To this effect Vinet recalls that the subject of 
 Mithridate is identical with that of L'Avare, the 
 fifth scene of the third act of the former corre- 
 sponding with the third scene of the fourth act 
 of the latter. In Walpole's familiar phrase, life 
 is a tragedy to him who feels, a comedy to him 
 who thinks. The subject-matter is the same, what 
 differs is the temper. The one type addresses 
 the heart, the other the head. The emotions aroused 
 by tragedy may vary widely — as, within our scope, 
 between that of ancient and modern times; the 
 passions of the ancient theater being dominated by 
 pity and horror, the agitations of the modern stage 
 being assuaged by sympathy or compassion. But 
 whatever the specific impression may be, it is cer- 
 tain that tragedy undertakes to arouse the sensi- 
 bilities in one way or another. Comedy, on the 
 contrary, is essentially intellectual. Its character- 
 istic is curiosity; and curiosity is passionless and 
 impartial. A comedy, in the French taste, is a dis- 
 interested study of human nature, a sort of critical 
 vivisection, wherein sentiment is misplaced. Once 
 excite the audience to indignation or indulgence 
 in respect of the characters, and comedy is at an 
 end; the play becomes a melodrama. This is the
 
 Racine 263 
 
 reason that Le Misanthrope seems to totter on the 
 verge of tragedy; Alceste is so constantly on the 
 point of conciliating the spectators' good will. At 
 least, such appears to be its effect upon the Eng- 
 lish reader, whose tolerance of eccentricity has 
 aroused the Frenchman's traditional suspicion of 
 his complete sanity. And indeed, there is not a 
 little in the comic spirit to make it appear malicious 
 and inquisitive in the eyes of the sentimental 
 humanitarian. 
 
 On the other hand, we must have an eye to what 
 seems to me the root of the whole difficulty — I 
 mean the confounding of comedy with humour. 
 Properly understood and discriminated, humour ap- 
 peals to the feelings. It recognizes the frailties and 
 foibles of human nature, not as a subject of interest 
 to the curiosity, but as a subject of interest to the 
 sympathies, as so many evidences of a common 
 humanity. One may view the weaknesses of a friend 
 with amusement, but one's smile is neither indiffer- 
 ent nor unkindly; indeed, it may be deprecatory or 
 even rueful. This is the mood of the great English 
 humorists like Dickens and Thackeray. In reality, 
 humour is a partition of the pathetic; for after all, 
 what difference does it make whether one's affections 
 express themselves in laughter or tears? The point 
 is that we are moved at all, so that in this sense the 
 source of one and the other, of humour and of 
 pathos, might justly be grouped together under a 
 single designation as the touching. On the contrary, 
 comedy, being naturally unfeeling, is, properly, no 
 less insensible to mirth than to grief. Stendhal 
 complains, rather naively, that there is so little fun
 
 264 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 in Moliere and other approved comedians of his 
 country — and so much that is merely " un rire par 
 scandale " and impertinent. At a performance of 
 Tartu ffe on December 4, 1822, in which he saw 
 Mademoiselle Mars, the audience, so he records, 
 laughed only twice, and then negligibly. " On n'a 
 ri" he says, " le 4 decembre." But surely, Stendhal 
 is wrong in trying to use this circumstance to 
 Moliere's disparagement. That he does so, goes to 
 show that, like most romanticists, he had little relish 
 for the comic as such. As long as the curiosity is 
 interested and the intelligence is busied — as long 
 as the complicated motives of human action are 
 unravelled, with all their contradictions and incon- 
 sistencies, for the entertainment of the intellect; so 
 long are the general conditions of comedy satisfied. 
 As a matter of course, the tone of such comedy is 
 realistic and conscientious. It is as serious in its 
 own way as tragedy. The difficulty is that while 
 tragedy finds a relief from its excesses in the pur- 
 gation of the passions or otherwise, comedy has 
 none, and lacking such an outlet, is liable to become 
 melancholic and atrabiliary. For such a one-sided 
 preoccupation with human inconsequence as comedy 
 demands of its practitioners, must result, at best, 
 in a qualified contempt for the race; at worst, in a 
 kind of moral hypochondria, like that from which 
 Moliere himself is said to have suffered during his 
 later years. 
 
 For these reasons it is evident that humour, on 
 the one side, is not necessarily incompatible with 
 tragedy. As it is itself emotional and in so far 
 pathetic or affecting, it may, as a matter of fact,
 
 Racine 265 
 
 be employed to reinforce a tragic effect, particularly 
 in conjunction with pathos in the narrower 
 modern sense, provided it is not discordant with 
 the key in which the passage is pitched. To this end 
 it has been used by all romantic playwrights — I 
 fancy, without exception. It has even been made 
 a part of the romantic propaganda, as witness Victor 
 Hugo and Friedrich Schlegel and Stendhal just cited. 
 Unhappily for its own credit — for there is some- 
 thing peculiarly unpalatable in misdirected or ill- 
 judged pleasantry — it has not always been handled 
 with discretion even by first-rate genius. The 
 grave-yard scene in Hamlet has shocked too many 
 judges of taste to be wholly exonerated of offense. 
 But though romantic abuses of this sort may have 
 brought the humorous into temporary disrepute 
 with a certain class of fastidious critics, there is 
 no gainsaying that it has received the stamp of 
 classical approval; it is used by ^schylus and 
 Sophocles, to say nothing of Euripides, as well as by 
 Shakespeare, though much more sparingly and tact- 
 fully, and in general though not always, in connec- 
 tion with minor characters. Nor are there wanting 
 touches of it in Racine, in spite of his habitual 
 severity. 
 
 In so far the romanticists are in the right: humour 
 has an indisputable place in tragedy. With comedy, 
 however, in its pure idea as represented by Moliere 
 — and it is in some such sense that Moliere's coun- 
 trymen must be supposed to conceive it — the case 
 is otherwise. Since its mood is irreconcilable with 
 that of tragedy, there can be no commerce between 
 them. We can not expect an audience to bewail
 
 266 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 the plight in which the characters find themselves 
 and at the same time to preserve an attitude of 
 nonchalant detachment as concerns their reaction 
 to those stimuli. It was not without reason that 
 the Greek tragedian was so scrupulous to neutra- 
 lize curiosity of any kind on the part of his public 
 even at the cost of suspense and intrigue. Not 
 only was he content with well-known subjects, but 
 he would not infrequently go out of his way to fore- 
 stall a doubtful denouement. Like the modern 
 dramatic purists, as we may think of them for con- 
 venience, he was up in arms at the mere suspicion 
 of a comic encroachment upon the confines of his 
 special province. 
 
 Now, one of the most effective of comic motives, 
 as I have already implied, consists in the elaboration 
 of the characteristic. Intensive individualization 
 is an invariable accompaniment of comedy. Com- 
 pare Moliere with our own Sheridan. While the 
 latter's witticisms are amazingly funny without 
 much regard to the speaker — in fact, it is related 
 of Sheridan that he was in the habit of shifting 
 his speeches about more or less capriciously; 
 Moliere's are so thoroughly in character as to take 
 their point solely from their appositeness in this one 
 respect, and to become dull and meaningless in the 
 mouth of another. The more intensely a character 
 is individualized, the more completely he is singled 
 out and separated from others who resemble him 
 superficially, and the farther he is removed from 
 common interests and associations. His most dis- 
 tinctive traits are those that are peculiar to him 
 alone; and they are bound to be " unsympathetic,"
 
 Racine 267 
 
 if not actually " antipathetic "; we can like others 
 only in as far as we are like them. Let the drama- 
 tist, then, individualize his protagonist to a degree 
 by emphasizing his peculiarities, and he becomes a 
 subject of quizzical scrutiny as far as he continues 
 to hold the attention; for it requires a considerable 
 amount of mental concentration to retain any in- 
 terest at all in such a character. The very analysis, 
 too, which is responsible for his exhibition, demands 
 a cool and dispassionate exercise of the intellect 
 for its appreciation. While, in addition, since our 
 peculiarities are usually ridiculous to others — " For 
 anything I can see," says Dr. Johnson," all for- 
 eigners are fools " — the process of segregating the 
 character, in converting him into an oddity, has 
 made him a fair mark for the raillery of the 
 beholders. 
 
 Hence the more minute the characterization of 
 a play, the farther that play leans toward comedy 
 and away from tragedy, so that the characters of 
 tragedy are always the more general and represen- 
 tative, or " universal.' While comedy is all for 
 the idiosyncrasy, tragedy seeks the mediating term, 
 the principle that relates all the members into an 
 order and brings them under the rule of their kind. 
 The Misanthrope is not mere misanthropy, as re- 
 volted by the insincerity of society, but an ex- 
 ception who has fallen into the wiles of a heartless 
 coquette, the embodiment of all the falsity for which 
 he detests his fellows. L'Avare, likewise, is the 
 comedy, not of avarice, but of the eccentric miser 
 involved in the extravagance of love. On the con- 
 trary, the tragedy of CEdipus Tyrannus is the trag-
 
 268 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 edy of filiation, from whose obligations his extraor- 
 dinary eminence is powerless to exempt him. 
 While as for Hamlet, indulging himself in his " quid- 
 dities " to such an extent that it is too easy to imagine 
 a Hamlet wholly after Moliere's mind, his tragedy 
 is the tragedy of a son too — but of a son who can 
 not always escape the comic anomaly of the hom- 
 icidal moralist. 
 
 I have come a long way around; I can only hope 
 that these observations may have gone a little way 
 toward explaining why the characterization of a 
 pure tragedy like Racine's — particularly the char- 
 acterization of the males, naturally pronounced by 
 reason of their sex and liable on that account to 
 exaggeration — must seem rather subdued to a 
 public untroubled by the dissonances of its most 
 serious literature — since it is probably on these 
 very principles that Racine avoided anything like 
 a duplication of his Pyrrhus and Orestes. In the 
 case of his secondary characters, however, whose 
 relief is lower any way, the habitual flatness of 
 his modelling, I speak relatively, is not, as a matter 
 of course, so noticeable. As sketches they are more 
 suggestive, leaving so much more to the imagination 
 — the warlike and lackadaisical Antiochus, prom- 
 enading his hopeless infatuation from siege to siege, 
 
 " Example infortune d'une longue Constance; " 
 
 the devoted Pylade, who whatever he may not have, 
 has at least a genius for friendship, — 
 
 " Au travers des perils un grand coeur se fait jour. 
 
 Que ne peut l'amitie conduite par l'amour? "
 
 Racine 269 
 
 and above all, the astute old politician and oppor- 
 tunist, Acomat, selfish, unscrupulous, circuitous, but 
 ennobled in defeat by the cool dispassionate courage 
 of his intellect, — 
 
 " Ne tardons plus, marchons; et s'il faut que je meure, 
 Mourons, moy, cher Osmin, comme visir, et toy 
 Comme le favori d'un homme tel que moy." 
 
 These are vigourous and interesting vignettes if 
 nothing more. 
 
 But even at that, Racine's distinction is not to be 
 found in this direction. On the whole his men are 
 accessory; they play their parts acceptably enough 
 for the purposes of drama, but their parts are not, 
 as a rule, great ones. His proper theme is woman. 
 And in this, his own field, he is, it seems to me, un- 
 equalled. For the English reader the contrast with 
 Shakespeare is unavoidable. Even in ordinary mat- 
 ters of taste an assertion of preference on the part 
 of the critic is likely, I know, to seem presumptu- 
 ous; how much more so when not only taste is con- 
 cerned but the ideals natural and acquired in which 
 it is rooted! For it is hard to say to what extent 
 we have moulded our conceptions of female char- 
 acter upon Shakespeare's heroines. Without 
 prejudice, however, I may venture to indicate certain 
 differences and distinctions, which may be thought 
 partly or even wholly national but which at all 
 events are real enough to merit enumeration. 
 
 To begin with, let me freely concede what is 
 usually regarded as the greatest achievement of the 
 greatest Elizabethan — the " naturalness " of his
 
 270 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 women. My only misgiving is whether, theatrically 
 considered, they are not too natural. I am not sure 
 that woman, to be in character, should not be her- 
 self a little artificial, whether her most potent at- 
 tractions are not in the nature of embellishments: 
 the women themselves have always acted on that 
 principle. But at least, to the extent that the stage 
 is an artifice and the drama is a convention, does 
 not this very " naturalness " of Shakespeare's women 
 throw them slightly out of perspective on the 
 boards? And again, I think it a fair question 
 whether they may not purchase their naturalness, 
 many of them, at the expense of the highest dra- 
 matic verisimilitude and significance. For it is 
 quite conceivable that a dramatic character may 
 possess " actuality " or truth of fact, to the detri- 
 ment of reality or truth of art. Such a character 
 may have all the interest of a likeness and conduce 
 to all the pleasure that recognition is capable of, 
 and yet want the final charm of illusion, that il- 
 lusion of a higher reality which Goethe speaks of 
 as the crown or halo of literature. And it is not the 
 obviousness of those long-legged, loose-mouthed 
 hoydens in rompers that I have in mind; I am think- 
 ing of the population of the tragedies. They are 
 all so innocently " womanly," so fondly domestic 
 and housewifely; their career is so obviously matri- 
 mony and their tragedy to be thwarted of an affec- 
 tionate husband and family. Neither Desdemona 
 nor Ophelia nor Juliet are legitimately heroines of 
 tragedy at all. They are wives and sweethearts 
 who ought to be happily mated and wedded. Nor 
 is there any reason in themselves why they should
 
 Racine 271 
 
 not be so. As for little Lady Macbeth with the 
 sullied hands, the most tigerish of her sex at first 
 sight, her vocation is not murder but motherhood, 
 and it is only in default of a cradle that she is re- 
 duced to spoiling her husband with his bauble crown 
 and sceptre. After the manner of their kind they 
 have little or no imagination — Juliet has a little, 
 perhaps; but indicatively the fancy of the play is 
 Mercutio, who perishes early in the action. And 
 wanting imagination they are almost destitute of 
 coquetry as well. Naturally, they are not without 
 the strength of their passions; but as a rule, they are 
 singularly free from sexual jealousy; that from the 
 Shakespearean point of view is a master passion — 
 characteristically, feminine jealousy is to his mind 
 a comic, not a tragic motive. Altogether their out- 
 look is pretty well bounded by the hearth. Cordelia 
 is as representatively the daughter as Juliet is the 
 mistress or Desdemona the wife. Isabella seems 
 to have tragic possibilities — though she falls under 
 the spell of her brother, the dominant male, for a 
 time; but in any event her dramatic destiny has cut 
 short her natural career by forcing her into comedy 
 and wedlock — unless, indeed, her marriage is her 
 tragedy, as may well be with her disposition. Cleo- 
 patra is, of course, another story altogether; and 
 with Cressida — to glance from my subject an 
 instant — affords a brilliant example of Shakes- 
 peare's versatility. But to reverse the common 
 phrase, the women for whom he is most renowned, 
 are men's women — a circumstance that may inci- 
 dentally have enhanced the popularity of his female 
 characters with the critics. Of all the great drama-
 
 272 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 tists Shakespeare is the most subject to the current 
 masculine illusions about women. As a result, they 
 take their cue from their masters, just as Racine's 
 men take their cue from their mistresses. And 
 though much more strongly charactered than are the 
 latter's heroes, as they are more " natural " than 
 his heroines; nevertheless they are comparatively 
 simple and intelligible when read in these terms. 
 
 That it is not for this type of woman that one 
 admires Racine every reader will agree. Who would 
 dream of turning to him for a pattern of elementary 
 domestic virtue — of mother, wife, or daughter? 
 Unless it be Andromaque; and how much more 
 Andromaque has in the back of her head than 
 Constance! Monime, perhaps, and Iphigenie and 
 Junie may be made, by some retouching, to take on 
 a deceptive resemblance to their English rivals; but 
 it is only that for an instant their helplessness and 
 dependence simulate a kind of simplicity which 
 might pass superficially for " nature," just as Cleo- 
 patra's promiscuous experience might be momenta- 
 rily confounded with the subtlety of a delicate and 
 discriminating savoir vivre. In reality their texture 
 is very different. The interest of Racine's women 
 
 — no matter of what sort or degree it may happen 
 to be — the property whereby they attract and hold 
 the attention, their very " femininity," in short, is no 
 unaffected grace; it is an accomplishment, which 
 is capable in their hands of becoming an effective 
 weapon either of offense or defense as the occasion 
 may require. In this sense and to this extent they 
 are creatures of artifice, if one likes to call them so 
 
 — that their character in its final effect is an
 
 Racine 2 73 
 
 achievement of care and cultivation. They are 
 thoroughly aware of themselves and their attain- 
 ments; and yet their refinement, though an acquire- 
 ment, is not an affectation, but a second nature. For 
 all her transports one can not conceive of Phedre's 
 lapsing into the " fair " Ophelia's unpremeditated 
 ribaldry under any circumstances. Roxane, as the 
 inmate of a harem and the despot of slaves and 
 eunuchs, is used to terrible atrocities, no doubt, but 
 it is difficult to imagine her so far forgetting herself 
 as to bedaub the bloody faces of her abjects with 
 her own hands. Such an abomination would suit 
 better the character of Clytemnestra or Electra. 
 That Racine wrote for a conventional society and 
 chose his subjects from such a milieu does not to 
 my mind affect the issue. Nothing could be more 
 " artificial " to our view than the status of the 
 Greek women; and yet the women of Greek tragedy 
 are much more " natural " and " Shakespearean " 
 than Racine's. On the other hand, paradoxical 
 though it may sound, the latter's passions are ele- 
 mental enough — more so, if anything — or at least, 
 more integral than Shakespeare's by virtue of the 
 superior proficiency of the characters. In any 
 event, the fact remains that the personages whom he 
 creates — whatever the vehemence and consistency 
 of their emotions — have not the sheer, unalloyed 
 " womanliness " to which we have been habituated 
 by Shakespeare; they are much too intricate and 
 enigmatic. With passion as his theme and tragedy 
 as his genre he confines himself pretty strictly, 
 since woman is his protagonist, to the representation 
 of the sex as a fatality, and of the female as the
 
 274 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 shrewd and not always scrupulous adversary of the 
 male. No creature can transcend its creator. 
 Great writer though he was, it would be absurd to 
 credit Racine with the demonic genius of a Shakes- 
 peare. There is no cause for surprise that the dis- 
 tinction of his heroines, like that of his craft, should 
 be the result of calculation and study. And yet 
 within these margins — narrow as they may appear 
 to the modern primitivist — he has, if not actually 
 created, at least given its classical illustration to a 
 certain female type — the woman of sophistication, 
 whose ends are in herself and not in man. 
 
 Of this type Phedre is the consummation as the 
 play itself is the consummation of modern classic 
 tragedy. I would not be thought by this statement 
 to belittle Athalie; it is an admirable piece and can 
 hardly be overrated. I recognize, too, its remarkable 
 analogies with Greek drama — particularly, the di- 
 vinity that shapes its ends. But withal, its perfec- 
 tion seems to me misleading — not that imperfection 
 is a merit in itself as the romanticists would hoax 
 us into believing; but that the flawlessness of its 
 structure distracts attention from what is, after 
 all, its factitiousness. In a word, it lacks the desin- 
 volture, the warmth and animation and expressive- 
 ness of Phedre. And not only is it distant and 
 austere, it is in a manner out of space, out of time 
 altogether; it belongs neither to its own period nor 
 to its own stage. In consequence, my admiration 
 is always a little dampened by my consciousness of 
 it as a tour de force, like the Samson Agonistes. 
 But whether my opinion is right or wrong is of no 
 great consequence at this juncture, save as a fa-
 
 Racine 275 
 
 vourable allowance may be held to excuse my neglect 
 of the play as lying outside of the genre that I have 
 been discussing; the question itself has nothing to 
 do with Phedre as representative of her kind. 
 
 I have often wondered whether any playwright 
 is capable of depicting more than one female char- 
 acter intimately and whether his several heroines 
 of the first plan are not merely this one daughter 
 of his imagination exhibited in different poses and 
 at different stages of growth corresponding roughly 
 with his own development. In Ibsen's principal 
 plays I seem to see, for all her disconcerting ca- 
 prices, a single woman growing up into a malign 
 prodigy. I do not question the theatrical effect; it 
 is, doubtless, that of multiplicity, — any woman has 
 a sufficient number of facets to supply at least one 
 complete repertoire. But in reading I persist in see- 
 ing a kind of identity — or at all events, a family 
 likeness. And so, to a certain extent, with Racine. 
 Roxane, so Vinet thinks, is only Hermione " appro- 
 fondie." The propriety of Monime, the ingenuous- 
 ness of Iphigenie, the restraint of Andromaque, the 
 diffidence of Junie, the petulance of Hermione, the 
 circumspection of Berenice, the frowardness of 
 Roxane, the langour of Phedre — these traits would 
 seem to be about as diverse as traits well can be. 
 And yet these expressions of a variable temper 
 serve but to dissimulate the persistent features of 
 an unmistakable consanguinity. Unlike Desdemona 
 and Ophelia and Juliet, these women are all tragic, 
 not as they happen to have been overtaken by the 
 dangers of a general mortality, but by disposition 
 and necessity. They are fey. Like Clytemnestra
 
 276 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 and Electra and Phaedra and Antigone, they are 
 born calamitous; and they share with them the sin- 
 ister dignity of predestination. But they are them- 
 selves again and of their own house by their air of 
 sensibility and personal elegance — by the impres- 
 sion which they manage somehow to convey of an 
 inviolable feminine privacy and reserve even in the 
 midst of their most shocking disorders.
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND SOPHOCLES 
 
 UNIVERSAL as is the recognition of the respec- 
 tive values of Shakespeare and Sophocles, yet 
 it is hardly recognized how wide is actually the 
 divergence between the kinds of thing that they 
 stand for. The instinct of our generation, which is 
 all for confusion, is to slur it over. That they rep- 
 resent two different attitudes of the human spirit 
 is clear enough. But it is often overlooked that 
 the two attitudes which they represent are not only 
 different but more or less antagonistic. They per- 
 sonify two diverse and inimical ideals of life and 
 literature. Aside from what is eternal and timeless 
 in them both, the one is modern, the other ancient. 
 And as far as these categories are significant, modern 
 is to be understood, by the light of its genealogy, 
 in the sense of popular and natural; ancient in that 
 of humane and moral. 
 
 In order to get my bearings to begin with, I must 
 recall, however perfunctorily, the lapse of the great 
 classical tradition, the tradition of humane culture 
 initiated by Greece and transmitted by Rome, which 
 is the great outstanding fact of the Dark Ages. 
 During that period, which was marked by the gen- 
 eral suspension or abeyance of literature and art, 
 there was gradually evolved a new and independent 
 civilization and " culture," in the narrower or socio- 
 logical sense of that word of many evil connotations. 
 
 277
 
 278 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 I will not call it Christian; though as far as it has 
 any universal character, it was determined in a great 
 measure by the Roman Catholic Church and by a 
 kind of thought whose subject-matter was mainly 
 theological. Its exact composition, however, I have 
 not the erudition to analyse; nor is it particularly 
 in my way to do so. Suffice it to say that along with 
 Roman Catholicism and scholasticism the great in- 
 stitutions of feudalism and chivalry illustrate ap- 
 proximately its general disposition. In course of 
 time this new and peripheral ideal of culture began 
 to generate secular and vernacular literatures, which 
 in some cases attained considerable proportions. 
 The temptation has been to exaggerate their impor- 
 tance, especially the German contribution, by mo- 
 tives of patriotic and particularistic prejudice. But 
 such monuments as the Nibelungen Lied, the Song 
 of Roland, and the Mystery Plays of England are 
 sufficient to suggest what might have been the result, 
 if these germinations had been allowed to come to 
 fruition without the intervention of the Renaissance 
 and the Revival of Learning. 
 
 Under the circumstances, however, the growth of 
 mediaevalism was checked and diverted, where it 
 was not subdued and overcome, by the recrudescence 
 of classicism. Instead of having but a single tra- 
 dition and a single line of development the human 
 spirit might now choose between two; or by dividing 
 itself variously it might find any number of outlets 
 for its activity. And at the same time, there was a 
 split in another sense — between the learned and 
 the lewd. It would be the scholars, the men of 
 education, the curious and the critical who would
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 279 
 
 be the most likely to revert to the broken tradition 
 of Greece and Rome ; while the people, the ignorant 
 and the credulous would naturally continue to move 
 with the stream on which they had been floating for 
 centuries — and in the same direction. It was in- 
 evitable, then, that where literature came under the 
 patronage of a court and an official criticism, it 
 should react powerfully, in the interest of distinc- 
 tion, in favour of the classic ideal ; where it was ad- 
 dressed to the people, however, it would persist in 
 the mediaeval sense, though its expression might be 
 modified by the precedents of restoration and re- 
 form. The former was the case with French drama; 
 the latter with English. There were courtly and 
 scholarly poets and essayists scattered up and down 
 the English Renaissance imitating Seneca and ridi- 
 culing the absurdities of popular playwrights. With 
 suitable encouragement and organization they or 
 their successors would have been capable of produc- 
 ing in time a classical English tragedy, such as the 
 French produced a century later. But the temper 
 and the habit of the nation and the example of 
 Shakespeare were decisive. The case is often mis- 
 conceived or misrepresented. Shakespeare was not 
 a great poet because he was a romanticist, nor was 
 Ben Johnson his inferior because he was a classi- 
 cist. That Shakespeare was a superlative play- 
 wright is merely the reason or one of the reasons 
 that romanticism prevailed in England; if he had 
 been an ineffectual one, it might not have done so. 
 Whereas if Ben Johnson had been sufficiently im- 
 posing, classicism might have attained the preemi- 
 nence it did across the Channel with Corneille.
 
 280 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 In this way it was the people who made English 
 drama through their favourite poet. If the court 
 had any official influence, it was probably exerted, 
 in accordance with Elizabeth's usual policy, to the 
 encouragement of the national and popular inspira- 
 tion rather than the humanistic. And the people 
 were the issue and the posterity of medievalism. 
 They cared nothing about antiquity and knew less; 
 their " culture," such as it was, was inherited from 
 the Middle Ages. They had been brought up on 
 the mystery and miracle plays. Better things 
 they might appreciate; but those better things must 
 appear in recognizable ways as outgrowths and im- 
 provements of the kind of thing they were already 
 used to. And so their choregus would find himself 
 committed to a certain kind of conservatism in enter- 
 ing upon his succession. Shakespeare was no radi- 
 cal, no reckless innovator; his invention as distin- 
 guished from his imagination was notoriously slight, 
 as seems to be the rule with genius. Critics have ex- 
 claimed over his borrowings and imitations. Un- 
 doubtedly, he was affected himself by classical 
 communications. It is impossible that living when 
 he did live, in an atmosphere of such ideas, he 
 should not have been affected by them. The Battle 
 of the Books seems a silly altercation on the one 
 part, if you happen to think that without the 
 ancients there would have been no moderns to boast 
 of. And it is equally undeniable that without an- 
 tiquity Shakespeare would not have been so wholly 
 Shakespeare. Nevertheless, whatever secondary in- 
 fluences he may have been exposed to, his direct 
 tradition is the mediaeval tradition and his handling
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 281 
 
 of it is such as to have made him the supreme repre- 
 sentative of modernity, to whom every romantic 
 revival has sought instinctively. 
 
 Without attempting to define mediaevalism any 
 more closely, then, I may point out what there is 
 in Shakespeare which is not in Sophocles. In the 
 first place, modern life — to give the word modern 
 its fullest extension as including whatever is novel 
 to antiquity — is tremendously more complicated 
 than ancient life ever was; and in the second place, 
 our manner of looking at life has changed tremen- 
 dously, to take no account of the advantage the 
 Greek has had over all other races in clarity of mind 
 and penetration of vision. Consider, for one thing, 
 how little the ancient knew as compared even with 
 the contemporaries of Shakespeare, how small his 
 stock of information. He was acquainted only with 
 an infinitesimal portion of the universe; of the globe 
 on which he walked he knew only an insignificant 
 corner bordering on the Mediterranean Sea. Of the 
 denizens of this earth, of its flora and fauna he was 
 equally ignorant; while its shape, size, constitution, 
 and manner of conducting itself were to him mainly 
 matters of guess-work. He had by no means dis- 
 covered all that the naked eye was capable of dis- 
 covering, if properly used, to say nothing of that 
 vast accumulation of fact which has been added to 
 modern discovery by microscope and telescope and 
 one and another ingenious contrivance for the 
 multiplication and extension of the senses. 
 
 Nevertheless — I may as well anticipate the ob- 
 jection — every ancient literature is not clear and 
 simple. And while the complexity of modern life
 
 282 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 has done much to make chronic a confusion and 
 sophistication of mind to which every age and race 
 is liable; yet the relative lucidity of Greek literature 
 is due also to the quality of Greek thought and to 
 the nature of its ideas. It is not only that there 
 is more fact nowadays, but that some minds — 
 modern minds particularly — are so constituted as 
 to be more easily impressed and dominated by it. 
 For it may be said with a degree of plausibility that 
 beyond a certain narrow limit life is equally ple- 
 thoric for every mind in proportion to its capacity, 
 as a sponge of a certain size will hold only so much 
 water no matter how much there may be in the 
 ocean. But the comparative intellectual simplicity 
 and lucidity of the Greeks is one of the fundamental 
 data which can not be accounted for historically; 
 it can only be noted and taken for granted. For that 
 reason I have nothing to say here about the Greeks' 
 preoccupation with the moral issue, which simpli- 
 fied life so wonderfully for them. While the cir- 
 cumstances surrounding this essential fact become 
 merely a complication of the subject itself. 
 
 As another such incidental circumstance, then, it 
 is to be remarked that along with this accumulation 
 of physical fact has gone a constant accumulation 
 of what may be called psychological fact. Not only 
 do we know more about man and his motives and 
 general mental machinery, but our heads have be- 
 come a depository of creeds, superstitions, hypothe- 
 ses, and opinions. No idea that once comes into the 
 world ever dies quite out; no matter how false or 
 erroneous it may be or how often exploded, its 
 ghost still walks, reappearing in one form or another
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 283 
 
 to haunt and unsettle the mind of posterity. And 
 their numbers are always multiplying; for naturally 
 enough it is impossible to increase our supply of 
 information without also increasing our explanations 
 and thereby adding to our theories, systems, and 
 philosophies. Given the facts, the impulse to ac- 
 count for them and dispose of them is irresistible; 
 and hence the swarm of dogmas — moral, religious, 
 physical, metaphysical, social, economic, literary, 
 artistic — which in succession have bewildered and 
 perplexed the world and whose crumbling remains 
 can never be wholly dispersed but serve as a found- 
 ation or soil for their successors so that under the 
 churches of Christendom you shall find the ruined 
 temples of Paganism and under the laboratories of 
 science the rubbish of transcendental superstition, 
 the broken alembics of the alchemist and the mouldy 
 horoscopes of the astrologer. And all the while we 
 are endeavouring to adjust our conduct to our dis- 
 coveries and our principles, until our relations at 
 large — our society, our culture, our civilization — 
 become ever more involved and intricate and un- 
 reliable. 
 
 In contrast with all this multifariousness how 
 simple seem the life and the thought of the Greek, 
 subtle in his way as the Athenian was. According 
 to Plato (or whoever wrote Alcibiades I) Alcibiades' 
 education comprised three subjects — grammar, in- 
 cluding reading, writing, and literature, as we should 
 say, wrestling, and the cithera. To be sure, he 
 might have learned the flute also if he had cared to 
 do so. There was little positive knowledge to be 
 acquired ; no deep historical deposits to be unearthed
 
 284 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 for history had but begun. Religion and philosophy 
 were still elementary; — or at least the Greek saw 
 them clearly and in high relief, unencumbered with 
 very much lumber — philosophy, particularly, in an 
 array of sharp antitheses — the one and the many, 
 the same and the other, rest and motion, being and 
 becoming. And in this wise being unembarrassed 
 with a thorny undergrowth of exceptions and vari- 
 ations, he was able to frame a scheme of things 
 which has never been surpassed, on the whole, for 
 its bold and distinct projection. No doubt, he would 
 have done so more or less successfully whatever his 
 materials, such was the character of his conscious- 
 ness; but he was assisted in doing so by the circum- 
 stances in which he found himself. Even the Soph- 
 ists have come to look to us like innocent and 
 transparent prestidigitators with very little harm in 
 them after all. 
 
 Nor was his practical life and conduct more in- 
 volved than his religion and philosophy. The citizen 
 of a small and isolated city in a comparatively easy 
 society, he was mainly engrossed by his relationship 
 to the polity of which he was a member and the 
 maintenance of his position and credit as a free man 
 in a democracy raised on a foundation of slavery. 
 His intercourse and association were mostly public 
 and by so much the more general and ideal; while 
 his private existence was itself narrow and reserved. 
 His interests were correspondingly broad and obvi- 
 ous; his cares and joys were reduced to the measure 
 of the community. In short, his consciousness was 
 at the same time more abstract and intense than any 
 we are now familiar with.
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 285 
 
 To emphasize the contrast between this generic 
 integrity in which Sophocles must have shared and 
 the circumstantial diffusion of modernity in which 
 Shakespeare had his part — a contrast admirably 
 visualized in Greek temple and Gothic cathedral — 
 we have only to recall the three great institutions 
 of feudalism, chivalry, and Roman Catholicism 
 which stand behind the mediaeval tradition, with 
 their subtle and elaborate conceptions of the rela- 
 tions of man to his fellow men — inferiors, equals, 
 and superiors — to the state, and to God and the 
 Church, along with the etiquette, ceremonial, and 
 ritual in which they sought to symbolize those ideas. 
 And if these institutions had early begun to lose a 
 portion of the influence which they exerted during 
 the Middle Ages, yet they had at least produced 
 an effect not to be easily obliterated and in 
 yielding finally gave way to other systems no less 
 intricate than they themselves. 
 
 This is no attempt, of course, at anything like a 
 complete account of the matter. Nevertheless, it 
 must be apparent that herein lies a fundamental 
 difference between modern and ancient — between 
 the new or romantic, that is, and the old or classical 
 literature, and in so far between Shakespeare and 
 Sophocles — namely, in this immense accession of 
 fact and the tremendous prolixity and sophistication 
 of experience and consciousness, both personal and 
 social, which results directly from it. In other words, 
 the data which even a writer of Shakespeare's day 
 had to master and take care of, were increased to 
 such an extent as already to make a significant 
 presentation of life a problem of incredible difficulty.
 
 286 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 And indeed, such an effect is visible in Shakespeare's 
 own drama at the most superficial glance. Every- 
 where, as compared with the work of the classical 
 dramatists, his plays are marked by an abundance, 
 a superfluity of fact and a consequent diffusion of 
 thought and expression. Not only is his " story " 
 twice or three times as long as Sophocles'; it is 
 crammed with incident and observation of all sorts, 
 congruous and incongruous, pertinent and imperti- 
 nent. Whereas Sophocles has five or six characters 
 to a piece, Shakespeare may run to forty or fifty; 
 and these characters, instead of being confined to 
 a single set of principals and their suite, are drawn 
 from various companies and from all levels of so- 
 ciety. The motives, too, by which these characters 
 are actuated, are, in the one case, relatively simple; 
 in the other, numerous and inextricable. About the 
 classical character there is something diagrammatic 
 or figurative, like a silhouette; about a Shakespear- 
 ean character there is likely to be something abstruse 
 and problematic. And finally, while the intention 
 of a Sophoclean play is more or less evident on 
 the face of it; that of a Hamlet or a King Lear 
 is dark and mystifying, and is engaged confusedly 
 with the elements themselves and immanent in 
 them. 
 
 So it is that as the amount of fact for which the 
 writer has to account, increases, his difficulties in 
 disposing it into a satisfactory system and of dis- 
 engaging a distinct idea will increase also. As life 
 becomes more and more miscellaneous, and as the 
 thoughts and emotions with which we contemplate 
 it grow ever more comprehensive, and our specula-
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 287 
 
 tions augment in subtlety and extension; it will be 
 harder and harder to express them even piece-meal, 
 to say nothing of composing an intelligible present- 
 ment of the society into whose existence they enter. 
 In other words, it will be ever more difficult to or- 
 ganize into literature and significance the materials 
 which experience has to offer. And simultaneously 
 with the rising welter of existence, it will become the 
 more difficult also to arrive at a clear comprehension 
 of its import. The weight of the facts will tend to 
 overload and paralyse the imagination. And at the 
 same time that the multiplicity of particulars will 
 obscure a perception of their import, it will distract 
 the attention to the mere observation and notation 
 of discrete peculiarities. The principle which pur- 
 ports to guarantee the external consistency of such 
 a world, be it evolution or elan vital, is altogether 
 too vague and rarefied to make sense of our artistic 
 and literary epitomes and microcosms. 
 
 Such, it seems to me, is at least one vital distinc- 
 tion between humanism and modernism, between the 
 art of Sophocles and that of Shakespeare. Whatever 
 is produced in the spirit of the former is incited by 
 the desire to make sense of experience. For such 
 an art circumstance is merely illustrative. What 
 counts is the large bold block of meaning; fact is 
 expressive only as evidence of idea. On the con- 
 trary, the art of a Shakespeare proceeds from a 
 spirit more or less under the domination of actu- 
 ality and subdued to what it works in. It repre- 
 sents an order of literature in which the conscious- 
 ness of life is no longer integral and consistent, 
 but is distributed into particular moments or
 
 288 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 phases. It is the picture, the image, the impression 
 — the illusion of swift and discontinuous succession 
 which is accentuated. Even Shakespeare's vision is 
 fractional; it penetrates and informs the single man- 
 ifestation and is dissipated with it. 
 
 Naturally I have no pretension to know how Soph- 
 ocles conceived his plays; but the fact that they 
 can be viewed severally in the light of a problem, 
 and a problem with a solution, is sufficiently in- 
 dicative of the distinction that I am drawing. With 
 other speculative spirits of his time Sophocles would 
 appear to have been profoundly impressed by the 
 observation that man is actuated by two paramount 
 desires — he has, as it were, a passion for happiness 
 and a passion for righteousness or justice; and it 
 is difficult or impossible for the high-minded ob- 
 server to contemplate with patience an existence 
 which fails to provide for the gratification of both. 
 Even in fancy the misery of the virtuous is re- 
 volting; the prosperity of the wicked dismaying. 
 Hence the urgency to reconcile the two ideals in the 
 face of such opposition and contradiction as were 
 tauntingly voiced by Callicles and Thrasymachus. 
 Plato, to be sure, settled the matter to his own satis- 
 faction by asserting the absolute identity of hap- 
 piness and justice — the state of virtue, so he rules, 
 is the state of felicity, irrespective of material cir- 
 cumstances and independent of the approval of the 
 gods themselves. But he offers no proof of this 
 declaration, save an implicit appeal to consciousness. 
 Of course, if one feels so, that is the end of it; but 
 it must be acknowledged that appearances are often 
 against him. At all events, Sophocles, who as a
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 289 
 
 dramatist had to deal with outward manifestations 
 rather than inward convictions, is neither so bold 
 nor so dogmatic. Perhaps he was not quite so cer- 
 tain. But in any case, it was a rather different 
 aspect of the subject which would thrust itself upon 
 his attention. As a tragedian he would be preoc- 
 cupied, rather, with human mischances and calami- 
 ties. On the whole, the question put to him by his 
 sort of theme is, not so much a question about the 
 character of the happy — whether he is virtuous or 
 not — as it is a question about the character of the 
 wretched — whether he is invariably unjust. To 
 be sure, in his extant plays he does face the former 
 question twice — in Philoctetes and (Edipus Colon- 
 eus. But in every instance he answers the question, 
 and he answers it in the general sense of Plato, 
 though less explicitly. Happiness and righteous- 
 ness, he seems to think, are somehow paired together 
 in the constitution of the cosmos, so that the former 
 exists in some manner by virtue of the latter. Nor 
 is such a conception in its large outlines unfamiliar 
 to pious souls in every age. Only there are these 
 two differences to be noticed. First, in Sophocles' 
 view the misery of injustice is not referable to the 
 judgment or visitation of an indignant or offended 
 deity. The execution of this or that ordinance or 
 the punishment for its violation may be entrusted 
 to the agency or instrumentality of some particular 
 divinity, who comes in this way to represent it, as 
 the Apollo of Electro, or the Furies of The Eument- 
 des. But the inviolability of the entire order or the 
 constitution itself is an impersonal and inevitable 
 law; for Sophocles' nature — and here is the second
 
 290 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 point of difference — is fundamentally moral and 
 relevant without coincidences and exceptions on the 
 one hand and without impertinences and miscar- 
 riages on the other. To Philoctetes and to (Edipus 
 at Colonos it assures the blessings of a reconciliation 
 with righteousness ; and the others it leaves, in their 
 several degrees, convicted of misdoing, as plunged in 
 disaster. 
 
 But this is all an idea. What Shakespeare has to 
 say about the facts is something very different. 
 Shakespeare is a mediaeval overtaken by the immense 
 perturbation of the Renaissance — a perturbation so 
 vast that its agitations have not yet wholly subsided. 
 Its immediate effect, however, was the erection of 
 incongruity or disorder into a vital principle. In 
 reality, there is a certain moment of the Renais- 
 sance which is fully as responsible for romanticism 
 as is medievalism itself, though it seldom or never 
 gets the credit to which it is entitled. For the time 
 being the rule of regularity and consistency was 
 pretermitted; the solidarity of character was 
 broken up. Man ceased to think and act in the 
 spirit of any one maxim, but gave license to all sides 
 of his being indifferently, without concern to dis- 
 criminate between them. He was no longer integer 
 vitae, a single and indivisible will, but an etre ondoy- 
 ant et divers. The duplicity of Shakespeare's char- 
 acters is a commonplace of criticism; and many and 
 ingenious have been the essays to derive their trag- 
 edy from the disaffection within their own souls. 
 Though one may not like the association of ideas, 
 one is perforce reminded by these attempts of Ten- 
 nyson's " second-rate sensitive mind not in harmony
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 291 
 
 with itself." But in that case why not call them mul- 
 tiple and dispense with all but the protagonist, who 
 comprises a privy conspiracy in himself? Not that 
 I would deny to Shakespeare's characters a share 
 in the distemper of their time — the apergu, when 
 properly guarded, is a suggestive one; only Shakes- 
 peare's is not primarily a psychological drama, and 
 to interpret it as such — as a study in " multiple 
 personality," for example — is to denature it. 
 
 The inconsequence that struck Shakespeare most, 
 it seems to me, was not so much an inconsistency 
 of character — though he is sensitive to that also, 
 as every one must be who has any experience of 
 modernity at all — but rather an incompatibility 
 of nature. It is not exactly a case of maladjust- 
 ment, as I see it, or of a faulty adaptation of the 
 creature; though that is necessarily involved, it is 
 a secondary matter. The point has to do with a 
 failure of continuity in creation, a kind of inco- 
 herence or inconsecutiveness in the transition from 
 the material or physical to the sentient or human. 
 Sophocles avoided the difficulty by giving the uni- 
 verse a moral bent or turn consonant with that of 
 humanity; the Renaissance relaxed the law for man 
 even within the confines of consciousness. Hence 
 a dissonance, a perpetual contradiction and confu- 
 tation of reason by circumstance, an irrational and 
 preposterous frustration of human aspiration and 
 endeavour by accident and fortuity, which being 
 essentially casual and unintelligible, has an air of 
 grotesque and idiotic triviality. There is something 
 insufferably stupid and odious about it. It has the 
 effect of an indignity, of an outrage to human nature.
 
 292 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 What an ignominious business is that in which 
 Hamlet finally loses his life, for a man of his parts 
 — and how Shakespearean! Nor is the end of Lear 
 less inopportune and futile. Even the sonnets are 
 drenched with this same feeling of perversity and 
 humiliation. 
 
 But mark that this sense of incongruity is not an 
 idea, like Sophocles'. It is an impression, or per- 
 haps, a notation. No doubt, Shakespeare reinforced 
 the effect; but the incongruity has its roots in the 
 indiscrimination of life itself. It is not that he 
 makes it appear so, but that it actually is so or 
 looks so. And particularly does it look so when the 
 items are viewed severally and successively, cine- 
 matographically, in the modern manner. In other 
 words, incongruity is a property of actuality not 
 of art. Racine is not incongruous; or if he is, he 
 has blundered. Sophocles is not incongruous. To 
 them incongruity would have meant vicious archi- 
 tectonics; for incongruity is impossible without a 
 mass of disorderly detail. Hence wherever incon- 
 gruity is discernible in a work of art, it argues excess 
 of fact and indifference to design for there is nothing 
 conclusive about incongruity; on the contrary. 
 Similarly, wherever the conclusion of a piece of 
 literature is unconvincing, the piece itself is deficient 
 in idea or intention. And so I can not help thinking 
 that Shakespeare was, as I have implied, concerned 
 rather to reflect life than to interpret it. He was 
 more interested in posing the problem than in solving 
 it. And a more vivid, intense, amazing image — a 
 more suggestive and provocative statement of the 
 enigma has never been known than Shakespeare's.
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 293 
 
 That such a literature, however, is incapable of 
 affording the highest satisfaction possible to litera- 
 ture, I hold to be indisputable. As is the case with 
 experience also, its very lack of finality is against 
 it. For life itself is never finished but ever lapsing. 
 No transaction ever actually concludes; it evolves. 
 One incident is prolonged into another, and so radi- 
 ates and ramifies that to bound or delimit it is im- 
 possible. And even in those rare cases where an 
 affair seems to have reached a period, the end is 
 splintered and ragged — is anything but such a clean 
 and tidy cleavage as we expect of art; nothing is 
 definitely settled, nothing or very little is decided. 
 The players of all the world go on much as before; 
 the lover is rejected or finds his faithless inamorata 
 coquetting with some one else and leaves her for 
 another more appreciative of his attentions, or for 
 no one at all. Or they fall in love against their 
 parents' wishes, and marry each other or the con- 
 trary — it makes little difference in the long run 
 either to themselves or any one else — they merely 
 become the centre or the centres of a new vortex 
 or the dilation of the preceding. Such are the facts, 
 objectively indifferent and indeterminate. And so 
 the writer who pretends to take things as they 
 come, kclt' avaynriv vto 8ivr]s, in accordance with 
 necessity, by force of the whirl, must either leave 
 his work at a loose end or else stitch it roughly into 
 some conventional selvage at variance with the reg- 
 ular pattern of events. 
 
 There are several plays of Moliere's — by no 
 means his worst — plays like Tartuffe and Le Mis- 
 anthrope, which the reader finds it impossible to
 
 294 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 lay aside without a sense of disappointment. In 
 the case of Tartujje the annoyance is particularly 
 sensible; the close of the piece is so obviously me- 
 chanical and factitious. It looks as though his char- 
 acters had finally been drawn into a predicament 
 from which no ingenuity was capable of extricating 
 them by natural means growing out of the premises. 
 There is nothing for it but a special intervention, 
 for whether the work of Grand Monarque or 
 Olympian, the issue is equally miraculous. It is 
 neither according to necessity nor probability, physi- 
 cal or moral; it is not5t' aXX-qXa, by consecution at 
 all. But Moliere in his degree is a realist. He may 
 not appear so in comparison with Shakespeare, 
 whose eye for the phenomenal is so marvellously 
 prismatic ; but he does appear so in comparison with 
 Racine, and also in the comparison of tragedy and 
 comedy, the latter of which is necessarily more 
 photographic than the former. Tartuffe may be 
 satire; but none the less does it disclose a minute 
 recognition of the mores of the period. In life, how- 
 ever, such knots as that into which Orgon is tied, 
 are indissoluble. The Orgons of reality fare like 
 flies in the meshes of the Tartuffes. If Moliere had 
 wished to close his play in the sense in which he had 
 been conducting it, he should have left his dupe to 
 flounder hopelessly in the web into which his credu- 
 lity had betrayed him. Such a cessation, however, 
 was impracticable; the audience would not have put 
 up with it. Overborne by custom, Moliere was re- 
 duced to flouting plausibility and forging a conclu- 
 sion, the most unlikely conclusion to what might 
 have been one of the most likely plays he ever made.
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 295 
 
 In Le Misanthrope, on the other hand, the case 
 is reversed: the conclusion is equally inadequate 
 but for just the contrary reason. With the excep- 
 tion of the engagement of the two " confidants," 
 Philante and Eliante, which is again, as far as it 
 goes, a thoroughly conventional expedient intended 
 to give the piece a deceptive appearance of finality 
 — with this exception Le Misanthrope ends very 
 much as such an affair is likely to end in reality — it 
 breaks up. Celimene is exposed and Alceste makes 
 his exit. There is a fine off -handedness about it; 
 and that is all. Nothing in particular is illustrated 
 in spite of the circumstance that the play proposes 
 a very pretty problem. And it is on this account 
 that the close is so teasing — that it does not answer 
 the very question which the action has tacitly pro- 
 pounded; if anything, it raises others. Hence it 
 is not surprising to find that the significance of the 
 comedy and even its status as comedy have been 
 a subject of discussion; for it seems hardly to 
 substantiate an idea at all, but rather to moot 
 certain of the dilemmas and paradoxes of social 
 ethics. 
 
 Nor is Shakespeare any less liable to this sort of 
 dislocation — he is rather more so, perhaps, though 
 in his case we are not so likely to be conscious of 
 discomfort because we have become more thoroughly 
 accustomed to his dramatic mannerisms. But to 
 take only a single instance, Measure for Measure. 
 It is not one of Shakespeare's great plays, to be 
 sure; but the subject has great possibilities over and 
 above those of which he has taken advantage. Why 
 he should have chosen to make a " comedy " of it,
 
 296 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 is an idle inquiry, though it seems from the tone and 
 atmosphere as though he must have done so against 
 the grain. But having once chosen, he was fatally 
 determined to a counterfeit and disingenuous con- 
 clusion. For such marriages as those of Mariana 
 and Angelo, Isabella and the Duke there is no ex- 
 cuse other than the artificial criterion which assigns 
 to every romantic comedy its quota of arbitrary 
 weddings as to every romantic tragedy its quota 
 of violent deaths. They are neither inevitable nor 
 intelligible, neither nature nor art. At best they 
 serve to dissemble after a fashion the inconclusive- 
 ness of nature apart from principle. 
 
 And yet there is one exception — in the case of 
 tragedy in the English sense — that kind of a trag- 
 edy, I mean, which has a fatal outcome. As a matter 
 of fact, death is a termination if not a consumma- 
 tion; it is at least a bound if not a bourne. It may 
 answer no questions, it may provide no solution for 
 our perplexities; but it puts an end to us and our 
 problems — it stops our mouths forever. And in so 
 doing, it simulates a kind of finality, even a kind of 
 fatality. In this respect, therefore, as far as " natu- 
 ralness " is concerned, there is no reason to complain 
 of the catastrophe of Shakespeare's tragedies. In 
 following life itself, he has come — without more 
 ado — to the one foregone conclusion. In this sense 
 there is nothing disappointing about the denoue- 
 ments of Othello or Hamlet or Macbeth or Romeo 
 and Juliet. 
 
 It is only from the moral point of view that they 
 leave something to be desired. And from this angle 
 I confess that to my mind they are not wholly
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 297 
 
 1 
 edifying. I use the word advisedly; though I arn 
 glad to be aroused by tragedy, I want not to be 
 left unsettled but composed. Of King Lear I say 
 nothing; the last act is obviously a blunder. I can 
 imagine nature in her stubborn courses stumbling 
 into some such blind and bloody shambles; that is 
 not the difficulty — the untowardness of insentiency. 
 But I can not recognize in Lear the logic or raison 
 d'etre of the genre, the bare technical congruity of 
 the literary " form " which is evident even in the 
 most brutal Zolaesque impressionism. A box is a 
 box whatever it does or does not contain, and is 
 possessed of a kind of mechanical integrity as such. 
 But the deaths of Cordelia and her father are im- 
 pertinent not only morally but theatrically; they 
 are extrinsic and superfluous. It is impossible to take 
 them up into one scheme with the preceding acts 
 of the play; they do not coalesce. I do not deny 
 that the tragedy has its grandeur, as stupendous at 
 moments as a chaos of the elements. But as a 
 whole, it is inconceivable on its own showing. And 
 so I say that Shakespeare has blundered somehow 
 as he has seldom done elsewhere in tragedy. 
 
 To a certain extent, however, Romeo and Juliet 
 seems to me another case in which he has failed to 
 carry out his own premises. It is a young man's 
 tragedy: even the poetry, splendid as it is in pas- 
 sages, and the admirable humours of Mercutio and 
 the nurse are immature for Shakespeare. Under 
 these circumstances, it might seem unfair to require 
 any very strict moral necessitarianism of its author, 
 if such were Shakespeare's way in any case. But I 
 should have liked to see the same fatality which
 
 298 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 passes through Mercutio find its mark at last in 
 hero and heroine. For the sake of dramatic effect if 
 nothing more Mercutio's fate should prefigure that 
 of his friend. But Mercutio dies in a vain skirmish. 
 The hostility of " both your houses " loses its drive 
 little by little until it ceases to penetrate the play 
 and dwindles into a mere pretext for the sorry over- 
 sight or misunderstanding which is actually account- 
 able for the catastrophe. 
 
 But the failings of Romeo and Juliet are technical. 
 As an illustration of the indeterminateness inherent 
 in " natural " tragedy Hamlet stands unrivalled, as 
 witness the proverbial character of the hero. It 
 has all the points of a primary and spontaneous 
 romanticism — the " problematic " temperament, 
 the " psychopathic " doubt and dejaillance, the 
 " picturesque " background, the " morbid " atmos- 
 phere, the " suggestive " treatment. Think what 
 could be made of an introspective Orestes with a 
 scruple, and what an illusion of profundity and 
 modernity might be created with the Electra as so 
 transmogrified. And on the other hand, compare 
 Bourget's Andre Cornells. The theme is virtually 
 identical with that of Hamlet; but what a difference 
 in effect! In the latter the remote fantastic setting 
 of feudal life and customs; the legendary castle of 
 Elsinore with its heavy mediaeval shadow, ghost- 
 haunted and visionary; the arras-hung apartments, 
 the barbaric display of royalty, the adventurous in- 
 cidents, and the distant echoes of the outer world, 
 of young Fortinbras and his marching armies. In 
 Bourget's novel, on the contrary, the din and clatter 
 of a nineteenth-century city, the populous streets,
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 299 
 
 the comfortable houses of the rich and idle, the in- 
 trigue of a vitiated society, the commonplace of 
 " civilization," and above all a kind of French clar- 
 ity and sharpness and assurance quite remote from 
 the thick and foggy sea air of Denmark. There is no 
 question about it: Hamlet is a tale of human fatuity, 
 not in the ancient but in the modern sense. It is not 
 that Hamlet deliberates to kill his uncle; he is well 
 within his dramatic rights in doing so. Nor is it that 
 he does actually kill his uncle before he is through 
 with him; that also is his dramatic right. It is the 
 indifference of conscience and choice — of every- 
 thing save coincidence alone — in the final result; 
 it is the affront to liberty and the freedom of the will 
 in that finally his calculations, his delays and hesi- 
 tations and reluctances should all go for nought and 
 that he should find himself at last tricked on such 
 frivolous occasion into an assassination so unpre- 
 meditated, so flippant even, as hardly to bear the 
 character of voluntary action at all. How uncon- 
 scionable, and yet with what consummate plausibil- 
 ity it is carried off! It makes not only the most not- 
 able example of Shakespearean irony but quite the 
 most " interesting " tragedy extant. Small wonder 
 that no two commentators have ever agreed as to 
 its intention. 
 
 Let us suppose a chorus of sententious old wise- 
 acres, after the antique fashion, gaping and gossip- 
 ing over the issues of the action; in what apothegm 
 or adage do you suppose they would sum up their 
 impressions? Horatio, who serves as a kind of 
 epilogue, speaks of it as a skein 
 
 " Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters."
 
 300 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 But can we think of a valedictory more inaccept- 
 able to the sober wisdom of antiquity? There is a 
 phrase of Hamlet's own toward the end of his 
 journey — an expression not inconsistent with the 
 spirit of the play — " the readiness is all," which 
 we should have no great difficulty in imagining a 
 Greek chorus' elaborating in the sense of Edgar in 
 King Lear; 
 
 " Men must endure 
 Their going hence, even as their coming hither; 
 Ripeness is all." 
 
 It offers no apology for the excesses of a conscience- 
 less eventuality; but it supplies a rule of conduct — 
 not wholly foreign to the Greek temper — in a 
 world of careless and improvident possibilities, so 
 that it is not astonishing that Shakespeare should 
 have repeated the sentiment in the two plays of his 
 which are of all the most unpunctual and inscrutable. 
 Macbeth, on the contrary, while thoroughly 
 Shakespearean and " natural," seems to present the 
 least difficulty to the anxious aphorist. For my part 
 — to take my slight exception at once — I am not 
 wholly satisfied with the interpretation which sees 
 in Macbeth himself but an evil-doer justly punished 
 for his crimes, though such an explanation, as a 
 " probable opinion " and relatively true for the final 
 scenes, may serve Its purpose as a rough and ready 
 means of disposing of the play. But if such is the 
 case, why has not the playwright launched the pro- 
 tagonist as a criminal after the fashion of Richard 
 III? The more I think of it, the more strongly I 
 feel that Shakespeare intended to represent a good
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 301 
 
 man gone wrong — so that to a certain extent Mac- 
 beth is by way of being a pendant to Hamlet. 
 
 Of course, the motives, sentiments, and circum- 
 stances of the two tragedies are very different. But 
 as far as the mere argument is concerned, Macbeth 
 is Hamlet with the inhibition left out. He is sus- 
 ceptible, like Hamlet, to " supernatural " sugges- 
 tion; he is equally irresolute — " infirm of purpose," 
 his wife calls him. No doubt, his profession, 
 as well as his later insolence, tends to obscure 
 the perception of his weakness; but a man may be 
 a courageous soldier and an indecisive character, 
 while indecision is not unusually violent in extrem- 
 ity — as, indeed, it is with Hamlet. In addition, 
 if Macbeth has not Hamlet's introspection, he has 
 something of the latter's abstraction, and — I 
 think it is Professor Bradley who has noted the 
 fact — not a little of the Dane's native amiability 
 and courtesy, when in his right mind. Need I call 
 attention to similarities of setting — the castellated 
 background and the air of ominous dubitation which 
 are common to the earlier scenes of both plays? 
 So close is the likeness at instants that one is 
 tempted to read in Macbeth's career the secret of 
 Hamlet's fate, had the latter done similar violence 
 to his conscience — as some commentators seem to 
 wish — at the promptings of an equally questionable 
 apparition. 
 
 But it is at this point that the dramas diverge. 
 Macbeth differs capitally from Hamlet in his reac- 
 tion to opportunity — a parcel of demented old 
 women on a heath, an ambitious wife, an old man, 
 and a throne. That is the pity of it. Nevertheless
 
 302 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 he incurs the odium of his villainy; and since he 
 has come to be what he is, there is no denying the 
 justice of his damnation. It is at least the conse- 
 quence of his own choice. In this respect the trag- 
 edy has a Sophoclean relevancy, which I would not 
 belittle, though I must add immediately that there 
 seems to be no higher motivation for his delin- 
 quency than chance and tide. And is it not true, 
 by the way, that to the consistent " modern " artist 
 the punishment of evil-doing is a " conventional " 
 rather than a " natural " climax? But then the 
 modern artist is not particularly consistent. 
 
 Of Othello I have little to say; it is self-explana- 
 tory. And that, perhaps, is the reason that in spite 
 of its greatness it is one of the least " interesting " 
 and " suggestive " of Shakespeare's great plays. A 
 famous general, a noble though simple nature, with 
 occasional flashes of poetic fancy and language, 
 who stifles his bride in the back room of a barracks 
 in a fit of jealousy and forthwith stabs himself, be- 
 cause he has fallen in the practice of a malignant 
 villain — the police court is too full of such mis- 
 adventures to permit a doubt of their authenticity. 
 Nevertheless, my spirit is disquieted as well by the 
 deaths of Desdemona and Othello as by those of 
 Cordelia and Lear, Ophelia and Hamlet. 
 
 My role has been an ungrateful one; it is so much 
 easier and pleasanter to praise an author's merits 
 and excuse his faults than to apportion the defects 
 of his qualities. But to this latter task my subject 
 has confined me far longer than I could wish. There 
 is one reproach, however, that I would not willingly 
 incur. I would not be thought to imply that the
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 303 
 
 closet is more than a kind of appellate court for 
 tragedy. The court of first instance is the theatre. 
 And it may be that under the latter jurisdiction my 
 dicta seem weak and fanciful. In stagecraft 
 Shakespeare has never been excelled. The diffi- 
 culties of Hamlet are figments of the student and 
 dissolve in the acting; the spectator knows nothing 
 of them. The " double time " of Othello is a prob- 
 lem of the study, not of the stage. Nevertheless, 
 while the text is not the play, it should be capable 
 of withstanding a certain sort of scrutiny. Though 
 it want complete verisimilitude — a verisimilitude 
 which perhaps no reading, however " visual," can- 
 wholly supply, it ought to evince the writer's prin- 
 ciples — for he wrote it after all. And in the same 
 sense in which he may test his manuscript impres- 
 sions in the theater, we have the opportunity to test 
 our theatrical impressions by the text. I know that 
 the line is hard to draw between legitimate cross- 
 examination and captious inquisition; but I have 
 tried to keep well within bounds by sticking to the 
 more obvious issues of literature. 
 
 Obviously, there are two sources of literary in- 
 terest — the likeness or the image and the idea, 
 corresponding with the two kinds of subject — fact 
 or " nature " and truth or import. A regard for 
 the latter presupposes a recogition of the former; 
 but a concern for the former does not necessarily 
 imply a sense for the latter. At the same time, it 
 is probable that a devotion to import may incline 
 to an accommodation or " arrangement " of actu- 
 ality, just as an absorption with actuality leads to 
 a neglect of significance. The vehicle or agency of
 
 304 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 likeness is imitation or representation; of truth, in- 
 terpretation. What Aristotle had in mind in defin- 
 ing poetry as an imitation I do not pretend to say. 
 I would merely suggest that the term was traditional 
 and that to a youthful art or criticism the securing 
 of a recognizable likeness to the subject is a matter 
 of first and disproportionate importance, on which 
 account the term imitation has been supplanted by 
 representation agreeably with the increased facility 
 of the artist. Still even at that, I fancy from Aris- 
 totle's own words, as when he calls tragedy more 
 philosophical than history, that his imitation was 
 less an imitation of reality than of ideality, of fact 
 than of truth. But however that may be, I have 
 no intention of using the word otherwise than in its 
 ordinary compass. 
 
 Where the source or subject of literary interest 
 corresponds with this process of reproduction or 
 exhibition, the gratification will consist in recog- 
 nition; otherwise in comprehension and illumina- 
 tion. On the part of the author, the one demands 
 an act of perception, which may be characterized as 
 emotional and ethical; the other, an act of intuition, 
 which I will not call philosophical lest it be con- 
 founded with metaphysics, but rather moral — yes, 
 I will go so far as to call it religious also. It was 
 not an accident that the greatest tragedy ever pro- 
 duced was of a distinctly religious strain. There is 
 something more required for the production of 
 great tragedy than an eye for "social" values: 
 there must be divinity in it somewhere. 
 
 On the one hand, the aim of literature can hardly 
 reach beyond the enhancement of actuality, whether
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 305 
 
 emotional or sensational — " scientific " Zola would 
 call the latter; its highest achievement will consist 
 in eliciting all the " human " or in registering all the 
 " interesting " manifestations which the subject is 
 capable of yielding. That the human degenerates 
 into the animal and the interesting into the shock- 
 ing is of no great consequence to the later practi- 
 tioners of the arts of realism and naturalism. On 
 the other hand, literature will aim at creating what 
 Goethe calls the illusion of a higher reality by in- 
 forming its subject-matter with moral relevance and 
 consistency, — the business of the dramatist being 
 to produce, in the diversity and confusion of sense, 
 a distinct type or expression of human significance. 
 There is no higher verisimilitude than that of truth ; 
 " documentation " is ineffectual in comparison. 
 Where the informing spirit of moral and religious 
 significance is absent — either because the author's 
 vision is dull or is distracted by the importunities 
 of fact — the work, taken as a whole, seems sin- 
 gularly dense, abstruse, and incommunicative. It 
 comes to resemble some substantial physical forma- 
 tion or impersonal aspect of matter — a great body 
 of water reflecting the landscape of its shores with 
 an effect profound, scenic, and non-committal. 
 
 And so it is that for all his " depth " Shakespeare, 
 as compared with Sophocles, is at once the more 
 reserved and the more suggestive. The remark is 
 true of the whole movement which he heads. While 
 the ancient is the more disinterested and expressive, 
 the modern is the more curious and exciting. I have 
 tried to show how equivocal are Shakespeare's 
 denouements, either because they are reluctant to
 
 306 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 pronounce a verdict or else because they turn out to 
 be conventional and specious when regarded as solu- 
 tions. At the same time, a performance which fails 
 to conclude, may still raise the question and raise 
 it in a thoroughly arresting manner. To be sug- 
 gestive it is necessary only that the writer should 
 be himself " suggestible " — that he should be sen- 
 sitive to outward influences and should model his 
 drama directly upon his impressions; for inasmuch 
 as experience is provocative in proportion to its 
 immediacy, that literature will be the most sugges- 
 tive which comes nearest to writing itself. Such 
 automatism we are accustomed to glorify as " in- 
 piration." In short, suggestion is a character of 
 indetermination, which is in turn apotheosized with 
 the epithet " infinite." A cloud may hint a thous- 
 and things — a whale, a camel, a face, a wall of 
 battlements, a range of mountains; but let it sub- 
 side into a single positive shape, if it will, and it 
 ceases to be portentous. A corner is only the more 
 mysterious for being obscure; the " wonder " varies 
 directly with the uncertainty. As far as Shakes- 
 peare is a piece of nature, his " magic " leaves us in 
 the end very much where life itself leaves us and with 
 very much the same sense of mirage. 
 
 Among all the many emotions inspired by this 
 mirage of actuality, as distinguished from Goethe's 
 illusion of a higher and significant reality, there is 
 one so indicative of modern literature, as of modern 
 life, that it deserves a few minutes' consideration 
 to itself. Perhaps the most persistent and invari- 
 able sentiment which a direct and inconsiderate 
 contact or " communion " with nature leaves with
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 307 
 
 the " communicant " — shall I say? — is that inef- 
 fable longing, that insatiable and aimless desire, that 
 " homesickness of the soul " which we have learned 
 to call nostalgia. Like the tedium vitce of Tacitus, 
 the adv/jLta of Chrysostum, the acedia of the mon- 
 astic Dark Ages, it represents the inevitable reaction 
 of the human spirit to the complete inanity and va- 
 cuity of a phenomenal and inconsequential existence. 
 But unlike them, it is no mere symptom of an oc- 
 casional or sporadic disease or even epidemic, but 
 rather of a chronic lesion in modern life and art. 
 Nor is the modern nostalgia, like its older counter- 
 parts, a mood of simple disillusion — an awakening 
 from the beguiling delusions of sleep to a realization 
 of the cold, drab desolation and bereavement 
 of day. It is, on the contrary, the mood of 
 deception — often of perverse and voluntary decep- 
 tion, of forced faith in impotent simulacra and 
 spurious oracles. It is an invariable penalty, for 
 instance, of the pursuit of " beauty " for its own 
 sake, and lies at the bottom of the melancholia and 
 distemper — or " temperament " as we like to hear 
 it named — which vexes every " artist " who will 
 hear of nothing but his art. 
 
 As a matter of fact, this feeling of nostalgia, 
 though familar enough to common experience in 
 connection with landscape, is most noticeably dra- 
 matic, perhaps, in the presence of a crowd: there 
 is nothing so baffling, nothing quite so hopelessly 
 convincing of the inability of man to find satis- 
 faction in the mere spectacle and raw material of 
 life. Here on the pavement has happened together 
 in some way a number of people. They are to all
 
 308 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 appearance individuals, separate and distinct enti- 
 ties. Each moves by what we call his own volition; 
 independently of the others he is going about his 
 own business. What that business is you do not 
 know; nor do you know his past or future any bet- 
 ter than his present. And more bewilderingly still, 
 he has concealed in his head, in that hollow box of 
 bone which houses his mind, all kinds of motives, 
 impulses, interests, many of which, we are told, he 
 is unconscious of himself. To every one, including 
 himself, this " poor inch of nature " is little better 
 than a riddle. And to add to the confusion, all 
 these secretive little cellular beings, these intensely 
 animated and vivacious automata seem to have 
 nothing in common. As far as can be detected there 
 is no principle of association, no formula or equa- 
 tion, no single expression which will take up just 
 these atomies here present and bring them together 
 into a system and account for their presence or do- 
 ings, their concurrence in just this spot in just 
 these numbers at just this time. They have no com- 
 mon denominator. They are like a swarm of motes 
 in a sunbeam: the flicker in and out; they flit and 
 fade; and they never reassemble identically or 
 simulate again the same set or combination as be- 
 fore. They unite in no one idea; they make nothing 
 but a phantasmagoria. Such is the throng; it is 
 absolute illusion — or I should prefer to say in dis- 
 tinction from that other higher illusion of law and 
 significance, it is mirage. 
 
 How much of the glamour of Shakespeare and 
 of modern poetry as a whole is owing to this mirage, 
 it would be hard to say — certainly, a great deal.
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 309 
 
 It is not Greek: at least when it appears in Greek, 
 and that rarely, we speak of it exceptionally as 
 romantic. In itself it is an evidence of imperfection, 
 whatever pleasure we may receive in abandoning 
 our minds to it; and it indicates a failure to dis- 
 cover, amid the shows of things, a home or residence 
 for the vagrant spirit of man. It inspires, first, 
 nostalgia, and then, satiety and distaste and skep- 
 ticism until succeeded by the affirmation of a higher 
 and more purposeful vision. 
 
 Here, as far as revolutionary romanticism is con- 
 cerned, the matter might be left. But with Shakes- 
 peare in the case it is necessary to enter a qualifi- 
 cation. If we consider, as I have done, that what 
 Shakespeare was most apt to represent is the muta- 
 ble many, the absolute illusion of the throng, with- 
 out attempting to inform it further than is essential 
 to herding it into the five acts of a play — though 
 this, to be sure, requires no small amount of con- 
 trivance in itself — if we suppose that at best he 
 attempts no other interpretation than this fairly 
 literal translation into the dramatic genre, respect- 
 ing otherwise the broad unconscious indifference of 
 nature; and if we suppose that in this manner he 
 has produced the most startlingly suggestive pano- 
 rama of life that was ever unrolled — in a word, 
 if he has rendered the mirage of actuality with 
 almost incredible vividness : — still we must add 
 that there are times, and those by no means infre- 
 quent, when he rises to a higher altitude, when he 
 gets clear of all this lower atmosphere of fog and 
 and cloud and obscuration, and sees the world for 
 what it is — a phantasm, a hollow and deceptive
 
 310 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 show in spite of its apparent bulk and solidity. He 
 has still no counsel of detachment, no pattern of 
 perfection or consummation; but at least he un- 
 masks and discovers it for what it is, for what every 
 supreme philosophy and religion has taught that 
 it is — a vain and disquieting shadow thrown upon 
 mist and resolving, like a little vapour, into nothing. 
 Such is the sense of his noblest and most memorable 
 passages : 
 
 " These our actors 
 As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
 Are melted into air, into thin air; 
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
 The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve 
 And like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 And I can not refrain from giving myself the satis- 
 faction of the following quotation also: 
 
 " To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow 
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day 
 To the last syllable of recorded time, 
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
 And then is heard no more; it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing."
 
 Shakespeare and Sophocles 311 
 
 This is the Shakespearean skepticism. And it 
 is as much a part of Shakespeare as his irony and 
 his nostalgia. Like them it is born of the mirage; 
 but it has the advantage of puncturing the bubble, 
 of riddling the deception. And not only occasion- 
 ally and in passages of this extent, but in brief 
 snatches also, every here and there, like momentary 
 flashes of lightning, stabbing into the obscure corners 
 of existence and lighting up their vacancy with reve- 
 latory glare, plays this merciless skepticism of the 
 greatest playwright that ever undertook to stage 
 this show of earth. There is no firmament, no dis- 
 tinct source of steady and beneficent illumination 
 to infuse the troubled scene with orderly chiaro- 
 scuro and perspective — nothing but the rocking sea 
 and the intermittent lightning. There is no vision 
 of an immutable pole, no reassuring intimations of 
 system and gradation. His inspiration is still dis- 
 persed among the several moments of his concep- 
 tion and is inseparable from the elements in which 
 he works. His ideas are immanent. Every case 
 is individual and exceptional; and his " art " is 
 essentially " descriptive." Nevertheless while skep- 
 ticism may not be the end, it is the beginning, of 
 wisdom; it confounds both matter of fact and com- 
 mon sense, and lays bare the imposture whereby 
 the mirage practises upon the vulgar credulity 
 of mankind, pretending to reality itself when the 
 sole reality is by virtue of the rational intuition 
 which transcends and transforms it.
 
 STRUCTURE AND STYLE 
 
 ONE OF the most remarkable achievements of 
 the romantic spirit has consisted in the devel- 
 opment of a literary style of such refinement, elab- 
 oration, and subtlety as to have drawn attention 
 more and more to itself and away from the bolder 
 and solider properties of design and composition 
 characteristic of classicism. While it can not be 
 said that every classic revival has centered directly 
 upon Sophocles in the same manner that every 
 romantic reaction has been made to hinge upon 
 Shakespeare, yet it is generally felt, and felt cor- 
 rectly, that the former is as truly the pole of the 
 one as the latter is of the other; and as a matter of 
 fact, it is just this relative importance and predom- 
 inance of style as compared with structure which 
 measures the distance between the two. In spite of 
 the felicity of Sophocles' expression — a felicity 
 which after all consists in the happy adaptation of 
 language to idea — it is evidently by his conception 
 that he imposes — the perfect proportion of parts, 
 the large outline of his general plan, the great indi- 
 visible block of his meaning. While it is impossible 
 to read Shakespeare without being struck by his 
 extravagance, inequality, and confusion — as im- 
 possible as it is not to be thrilled and dazzled by 
 the brilliancy and splendour of those frequent sal- 
 lies on which it would seem that he must have relied, 
 
 312
 
 Structure and Style 313 
 
 in the exuberance of his genius, to redeem the im- 
 pression of his faulty and careless economy. 
 
 Even among living literatures those prevailingly 
 romantic are comparatively indifferent or insensible 
 to structure, or composition in the broader sense, 
 as might be shown by a comparison of English and 
 German with French; while the distinctive effect 
 of lyric poetry, which is virtually a creation of 
 romanticism, has been purchased by a sacrifice of 
 form to manner. Indeed, it can hardly have escaped 
 the attention of the most casual observer that 
 poetry as a whole has been completely transformed 
 in the sense of the romantic evaluations of the last 
 century. The old architectural analogies and fig- 
 ures of speech, the plastic tropes and metaphors — 
 heirlooms, many of them, of antiquity — by which 
 literature was once assimilated with the arts of con- 
 struction and design, have been gradually sup- 
 planted by terms of music and painting, arts of 
 execution and expression, almost exclusively. It is 
 no longer the ground-plan, the fond, the general 
 lines, the sage proportions, the ordonnance of a 
 work for which the critic reserves his enthusiasm; 
 it is the " purple patches," the " tone-colour," the 
 " word-painting," the " visualization," the " melo- 
 dies " or " harmonies," the " instrumentation." The 
 term playwright has no further sense; the dramatist 
 is a maker of tableaux; while the poet composes 
 symphonies or sonatas or even " diapasons of 
 colour." 
 
 Under the circumstances, since the distinction is 
 not only admitted but approved already, it may not 
 be profitless to trace the consequences of such a
 
 314 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 preference for style or structure, in the hope to 
 surprise the peculiarities of disposition in which it 
 has its root, together with the characteristics of the 
 literature corresponding and its effects upon the 
 consciousness of the reader. 
 
 Now, literary organization is, on the face of it, 
 so largely a matter of selection that there is, if any- 
 thing, a temptation on the part of its students to 
 underrate other factors of equal or even greater im- 
 portance. So, to William James mental organiza- 
 tion, of which literary organization is only the con- 
 summation, seems to consist almost exclusively in 
 the exercise of choice. And if only I may add the 
 qualification conscious, I shall be disposed to go a 
 long way with him. For conscious selection implies 
 a purpose or aim, which in turn implies an idea or 
 perception of significance; and literary " creation " 
 is marked, to my mind, by the presence of just 
 such an informing idea or principle. The fact is 
 plain. It is impossible to choose materials of any 
 sort without knowing what is to be done with them; 
 and it is impossible to know what is to be done 
 with them without understanding them, not merely 
 as materials but also as self-subsisting realities or 
 ends in themselves. Choice involves intent, the 
 prevision of an end and the apprehension of the 
 means whereby it may be attained and the will to 
 reach it; and not only that, but above all and prin- 
 cipally, it presupposes the sense in which the whole 
 affair is to be taken, inclusive of the subject con- 
 sidered in the light of an independent value or source 
 of interest. Hence organization, involving conscious 
 selection, involves a discrimination in favour of
 
 Structure and Style 315 
 
 certain means and against certain others, a prefer- 
 ence for certain matter over other matter in view of 
 a definite appraisal or judgment of the content as 
 a theme of general human moment or concern. 
 
 This, then, is what makes the essential difference 
 between literature and life; and it is on this account 
 that the appreciation of art and the appreciation 
 of nature rest upon entirely different bases. While 
 our current consciousness is usually flat and colour- 
 less and tame, a genuine work of art is enhaloed 
 with a kind of nimbus or aureole; it irradiates a 
 charm or glamour of its own. It inspires a con- 
 viction of finality and completeness. In short, liter- 
 ature produces a characteristic illusion, Goethe's 
 illusion of a higher reality; while our current con- 
 sciousness produces no illusion whatever. 
 
 " As Esmond crossed over to his own room . . . and 
 turned to enter in at the low door, he saw Lady Castle- 
 wood looking through the curtains of the great window 
 of the drawing-room overhead, at my Lord as he stood 
 regarding the fountain. There was in the court a pecul- 
 iar silence somehow; and the scene remained long in 
 Esmond's memory: — the sky bright overhead; the 
 buttresses of the building and the sundial casting a 
 shadow over the gilt memento mori inscribed under- 
 neath; the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel 
 nearly white, the one with his face up to the sun, and 
 the other snuffing amongst the grass and stones, and my 
 Lord leaning over the fountain, which was bubbling 
 audibly." 
 
 This is not nature ; it is not even consciousness — 
 it is not actuality at all. It is illusion, the illusion
 
 316 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of a higher reality, the effect of significance. And 
 in every case where the organization of material is 
 anywhere near complete, this sense of significant 
 illusion with its penetrating and satisfactory charm 
 is invariably disengaged. It does not occur in our 
 quotidian consciousness because that consciousnesss 
 is not thoroughly organized and hence is not thor- 
 oughly significant. Only when man's life is mastered 
 by some great and overpowering purpose which dom- 
 inates for the time his whole being, does he find 
 anything like this sense of illusion in every-day 
 events. A memory, however, is in its way a work 
 of art and produces an impression of art just to the 
 extent that it ceases to be reproductive and becomes 
 representative. It is rudimentary literature, to be 
 sure, but still it is literature — literature with struc- 
 ture but no style. Indeed, the mood of reminiscence 
 is the mood of literature. And as such recollection 
 is sharply marked off from sensation; it is partially 
 organized. But since this topic is fundamental, 
 since it lies across the very threshold of literature, 
 it is worth while to make a special effort to illustrate 
 it — and the more simply the better even at some 
 risk of over-obviousness. 
 
 Everybody recognizes that any work of art — and 
 for the present I will continue to include literature 
 under that head — is made up of a number of differ- 
 ent elements or constituents all combined to produce 
 a single large effect. Now, it is impossible to put 
 together even two or three components, let alone a 
 number, without some purpose to serve as a guide 
 in doing so. Even a carpenter can not get his boards 
 together into a box unless he foresees the box into
 
 Structure and Style 317 
 
 which they are going. And his aim or purpose, as 
 is equally patent in so plain a case, includes also a 
 just appreciation of the value or possibilities of the 
 elements to be composed. In so far it is critical; 
 it involves a criticism of his material. The carpen- 
 ter would be farcical if he tried to make a box out of 
 pebbles or bricks — and no less so if he used ma- 
 hogany or Circassian walnut for fence rails or 
 clothes posts. He might still be a good joiner, but 
 he would betray his inability to see anything in his 
 stuff or to make anything out of it; he would prove 
 himself to be a man of no ideas. The competent 
 cabinet-maker, then, has two notions — one of his 
 genre, the box; the other of his stuff. The first is 
 a model or pattern, the latter an idea proper. 
 
 In other words, it is necessary to distinguish two 
 questions which are commonly confounded and in- 
 terchanged, sometimes innocently but sometimes 
 mischievously. The one is a question of trade or 
 technique; the other a question of art or criticism. 
 While every art has its trade or craft, it is a mis- 
 take, though a frequent one, to assume that the 
 trade or craft which underlies the art, is in 
 so far forth an art of itself. For the competent 
 cabinet-maker the two questions may be phrased 
 in this way: What kind of chest will this par- 
 ticular lumber make? and, What will this chest 
 make of this particular lumber? If a playwright 
 be substituted for the cabinet-maker, however, these 
 questions will read even more pertinently: What 
 kind of tragedy will this subject-matter make? and, 
 What will this tragedy make of this subject-matter? 
 The former is a question of genre; it is raised and
 
 318 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 answered by the type. It is purely technical and 
 banausic, and goes with the trade or craft of writing 
 alone; and it is of comparatively little moment or 
 importance to anyone save the litterateur himself, 
 and to him only in the capacity of artisan. In spite 
 of the general publicity given it by certain loqua- 
 cious romanticists of the third or fourth generation, 
 like Flaubert (indeed, it is this kind of talk which 
 makes them seem so disconcertingly amateurish for 
 all their appalling sophistication) this problem be- 
 longs to the study and the atelier; it is " shop." The 
 second is the literary and artistic question par ex- 
 cellence — What will this tragedy make of this sub- 
 ject-matter? — as it is the critical question also. It 
 is concerned for import and significance. It asks, 
 not what are the aesthetic possibilities of this sub- 
 ject in terms of style and execution, but what is 
 its intelligible interest as representative of idea and 
 life. And the answer is addressed directly to life 
 and its issues. 
 
 To be sure, the stuff in which the writer works 
 is not identical with that of the cabinet-maker or 
 the artist; but the same argument holds for both. 
 The matter out of which the novelist or the dramatist 
 is trying to make his story or his play is the matter 
 of experience. The words are merely symbolic; 
 they are not the stuff of his creation; they are but 
 signs of the realities with which he has to do, mere 
 notations, and may even be dispensed with concep- 
 tually, as in memory. Properly and exactly, his ele- 
 ment is life; and before he can determine it in this 
 sense or that, he must have some definite idea of its 
 significance — not a vague impression of immensity
 
 Structure and Style 319 
 
 and confusion, a swimming of the head or a ringing 
 of the ears, a sensation of intoxication and exalta- 
 tion, of bemusement and wonder — but (dare I say 
 so in this generation?) a kind of philosophy, at 
 least a few fundamental principles, if not of life as 
 a whole, at all events of that portion of it with 
 which he habitually deals. And since his whole 
 organization is dependent upon this idea or prin- 
 ciple, it must come to constitute the informing spirit 
 of his work. 
 
 The pretension of modern romanticism in its more 
 " realistic " and " naturalistic " activities to find 
 the informing idea or principle of literature in " na- 
 ture " itself so that literature has nothing more to 
 do conceptually than just to shepherd the facts 
 into the fold of some genre or other — this assump- 
 tion is so preposterous to unspoiled common sense 
 as hardly to bear statement, much less analysis. In- 
 deed, it is hard to account for the currency of such 
 a belief, so inconsequent and pointless does actu- 
 ality appear in its ordinary manifestations — a whir 
 of disorderly sensations, a smear of forms and 
 colours, a jangle of unmusical sounds. Try to di- 
 gest your impressions for the course of a day — 
 the odds and ends of humanity you have met, the 
 sputters of broken talk you have overheard and 
 taken part in, the momentary vexations and annoy- 
 ances you have suffered, the passing emotions, the 
 flutter of spirits, the shivers and goose-flesh, the 
 lapses of attention — and yet the minutes of such 
 experience should be the perfect realism, if minutes 
 were but a genre as Friedrich Schlegel tried to make 
 them.
 
 320 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Of course, we have come to believe, some of us, 
 though on very questionable evidence and as much 
 for the sake of saving our face as for any better 
 reason, that nature, taken as a whole, has a sort of 
 higher unity in a transcendental idea of some kind. 
 We like to think that there is a universal term or 
 expression which embraces and reconciles and ex- 
 plains away all contradictions and incompatibilities. 
 To an infinite intelligence, we suggest, all this con- 
 fusion and bewilderment to which we are subjected, 
 would straighten out and present a symmetrical 
 appearance of graduation and regularity. But un- 
 fortunately we do not know any such scheme; we 
 merely feign it, we can not detect it for ourselves. 
 We have never yet been able to reduce history to 
 science because we have never been able to discover 
 any rule to which human life as a whole conforms, 
 though just now some of us are much given to mum- 
 bling economic rigmarole, while others of us are 
 rather inclined to suspect with M. Bergson that vi- 
 tality is mainly irrational and unintelligible after 
 all, little as we like his view of the relative impor- 
 tance of that portion of it or his conclusions with 
 regard to the consequences of such a faith. With 
 the physical universe our mechanics have done a 
 little better, if we are willing to disregard certain 
 discrepancies and overlook certain gaps and lapses. 
 And yet we have not banished one spectre — a 
 doubt of the competence, if not of the relevancy, of 
 this inhumane science and of its ability to read the 
 riddle of man. 
 
 And yet suppose for the sake of argument that we 
 are on the right track nowadays — suppose that
 
 Structure and Style 321 
 
 there is an ultimate mechanical or mathematical or 
 scientific principle — if any one can imagine such 
 a thing — under which all nature and life are sub- 
 sumed; even then such an idea would be too vast, 
 too distended to serve as the constituent principle 
 for just a single isolated work of art or literature. 
 It would transcend the infinitesimal circumscriptions 
 of experience with which we deal and which are too 
 restricted even to enter the law of averages — it 
 would not make sense of a crowd. As far as the 
 author is concerned, he would be just where he was 
 before. Pack nature into your containers as much 
 as you please, it is nature still; you have altered its 
 figure but you have not made sense of it. And 
 until you do so, it is neither literature nor art. 
 
 I am ashamed to have dwelt so long on such a 
 subject; it all seems so simple and self-evident. My 
 excuse must be the perversity with which the whole 
 matter has been misrepresented in the interests 
 of a conception of art so narrow and partial and 
 false as to have brought the very name of art itself 
 into disrepute among the serious to a degree un- 
 paralleled since the days of Plato. Nevertheless, in 
 spite of these confusions, it ought to be clear to an 
 eye of any discernment at all that the structure 
 demanded by literature requires insight or vision or 
 intuition — the ability to find a meaning or signifi- 
 cance for the data of experience; for without such 
 a key there can be no conscious discrimination or 
 selection of material, no point in handling it above 
 the bare dexterity of technique, which makes for 
 artistry, not art. And further, since the subject of 
 literature is principally human nature, it is obvious
 
 322 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 that this intuition upon which the author depends 
 for the inspiration of his work, must be a rational 
 and moral intuition — not a sensational or emotional 
 one; for all other considerations apart, a sensational 
 or emotional inspiration would never support a 
 closely concatenated fabric of sustained significance. 
 Such an inspiration must be one capable of enlisting 
 the services of the intellect as against the spasmodic 
 impulses of an irrational instinct. 
 
 It follows, then, that if we would discover the 
 author's meaning, we must look to his design, for 
 there, if anywhere, it resides. Whatever signifi- 
 cance a piece possesses is to be sought in the con- 
 stitution of that piece as a whole and not in the 
 several members taken singly. It is the plan or 
 plot, as Aristotle implies, which is the index to the 
 writer's vision. And it is this body of meaning for 
 which the name form should be reserved, if the 
 word is to have any literary application at all. For 
 language or expression such a term is evidently a 
 misnomer; it is appropriate only when used of the 
 configuration of elements as fixed by the presiding 
 conception. The form is determined by the frame, 
 which is the schema of the idea. 
 
 Style, however, is quite another affair; and 
 though it has its own function too, still it is the 
 organ of idea. Properly and in a correct balance of 
 faculties, it presupposes intuition. Only where con- 
 ception leaves off does style enter to carry out its 
 decrees. Its office is to translate the idea into lan- 
 guage. It is an interpreter and is not itself respon- 
 sible for the oracles it utters under the influence of 
 the vision. It is quite possible that an author
 
 Structure and Style 323 
 
 should compose his work without ever thinking 
 about style. Racine appears to have framed his 
 tragedies first in prose; there is among his papers 
 an act or so of an Iphigenia in Tauris outlined in 
 this manner. Sophocles is reported to have called 
 a tragedy of his completed when he had only 
 thought it through wordlessly. Goethe wrote the 
 whole of his Iphigenia in prose before turning it 
 finally into verse. In short, style is nothing more 
 than the practical procede by which some one por- 
 tion of the design is realized or executed. The 
 phraseology may be very curious, very pretty, 
 very brilliant; but the impressions which it pro- 
 duces, unless correlated into an intelligible pattern, 
 are only partial and disparate at best. And what 
 is worse, they will, if exaggerated, distract attention 
 from the main concern and attract it to themselves 
 to the detriment of the idea. 
 
 Still the relationship between conception and style 
 is wonderfully intimate inasmuch as style belongs 
 to the trade upon which literature is reared — the 
 trade of letters. And since language is the sole 
 medium for the communication of ideas, it is style 
 upon which the author must rely exclusively to 
 bring out point by point the significance upon which 
 his illusion depends, and above all to produce the 
 requisite sensible effect from moment to moment. 
 This latter obligation, to take care of the sensible 
 effect of the moment, is the primary duty of style, 
 as it is the primary duty of structure to take care 
 of the meaning of the subject. This is the original 
 and first-hand contribution of style to illusion, and 
 it is inimitable. For this reason the finest poetry is
 
 324 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 untranslatable. The general conception, the theme, 
 the intention of poetry may indeed be reproduced 
 in one way or another; and from these sources it is 
 not impossible for one who is himself potentially a 
 poet to recreate the characteristic illusion of the 
 original from the beginning. But in as far as the 
 illusion depends upon the appreciation of the proper 
 sensible notes seriatim, translation is wholly in- 
 adequate. As a matter of fact it is always unsuc- 
 cessful in detached passages; and it is the more 
 unsuccessful where the imaginative fusion is the 
 greater. The German translation of Shakespeare is 
 a remarkable performance; one has only to turn 
 to Ducis' to see how remarkable — about the Ger- 
 man language there is a kind of inchoateness which 
 makes it an unusually good vehicle for translation. 
 And yet with all its merits, it leaves something un- 
 matched when compared sentiment by sentiment 
 with Shakespeare: — 
 
 " Mir war, als rief es: Schlaft nicht mehr! Macbeth 
 Mordet den Schlaf! Ihn, den unschuldigen Schlaf; 
 Schlaf, der des Grams verwor'n Gespinnst entwirrt." 
 
 The last line is a marvellous bit of rendering: in 
 spite of the fact that it means just the opposite of 
 what the English seems to mean, it comes the near- 
 est of any single line of translation that I know to 
 catching the sentimental thrill of the original. And 
 yet weigh it with the English phrase by phrase — 
 
 " Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more! 
 Macbeth does murther sleep, — the innocent sleep, 
 Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care " —
 
 Structure and Style 325 
 
 and there is a difference of timbre which I can not 
 describe but which is perceptible enough. No; 
 style, together with the sensible modulation of which 
 it has charge, is inimitable — and just so much of 
 the significant illusion too. 
 
 To state succinctly the case of style in relation 
 to structure, it is safe to say that indispensable as 
 style is in executing the details of conception, it 
 should none the less take its cue, even as a sensible 
 exponent, from the theme or plan; for what the 
 phraseology of an author discovers is only a suc- 
 cession of distinct traits which are in themselves 
 intransitive and receive their determination solely 
 from their association or fusion in a common design, 
 as characteristics inhere in a character. Style, in 
 short, is an affair of the phrase; it is a strain which 
 fills the ear for an instant and dies away to be 
 succeeded by another equally impermanent. What 
 it does is to render in the fitting sentimental key 
 a single effect called for by the motive or idea. The 
 interest results from the synthesis of all these par- 
 ticulars. But their fusion requires that the mo- 
 ments should dissolve or melt into the solution. 
 Hence a special or extraordinary accentuation of the 
 separate strokes — anything exaggerated or ornate 
 as well as anything merely odd or erratic in the 
 style impairs the illusion, as it disintegrates the 
 form. 
 
 Important as they are, the consequences which I 
 have been discussing are not the sole consequences 
 of structure by any means. In addition, design has 
 an intellectual as well as an imaginative aspect. 
 And it is the cultivation of structure in this sense,
 
 326 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 without vision or insight to inspire and spiritualize 
 it, which is responsible for the rather grim and for- 
 bidding air of intellectualism characteristic of 
 pseudo-classicism. In this aspect form itself be- 
 comes a matter of technique — a branch of the trade 
 of authorship. It is confined to the notion of a more 
 or less methodical organization or incorporation of 
 members into a common body. Differentiation of 
 parts or organs and integration of functions be- 
 comes the criterion of the successful product. And 
 just as the health of the human system inheres, not 
 in this and that organ, but in their integration, so 
 the virtue of the literary composition lies, not in the 
 parts or even in the summation of the parts, but in 
 their coordination and coherence. It is, therefore, 
 essential that the writer who devises the work and 
 the reader who peruses it, should be able to appre- 
 ciate this congruity. But the perception and en- 
 joyment of relationships is an intellectual exercise. 
 It requires of the writer the peculiar ability to 
 discriminate among a crowd of discrete details im- 
 portuning his attention simultaneously and the 
 peculiar skill to dispose or digest his selection into 
 a scheme or plan; while on the part of the reader 
 it requires the same faculty only in lesser degree — 
 besides the feat of holding them all together in a 
 single combination. Hence literary construction 
 presumes a certain amount of mental effort, varying 
 with the severity of the organization. It is quite 
 feasible to teach composition, as divorced from 
 vision. Any one with intelligence can learn to put 
 his work together creditably, if he wants to badly 
 enough — every educated Frenchman can do so —
 
 Structure and Style 327 
 
 though it is doubtful whether every intelligence 
 possesses the insight which alone makes composition 
 significant, or can acquire the style which alone will 
 make it expressive. The one calls for great power 
 of divination, the other for great sensibility; and 
 these are rare and special gifts, their alliance 
 amounting to something like genius. 
 
 At all events, the conclusion is clear. Since 
 structure, considered technically, lies within the 
 scope of intellect, a writer whose character is pre- 
 ponderantly intellectual will naturally stress the 
 technique of composition above style and expres- 
 sion. He will be likely to prefer a clean, tidy, defi- 
 nite, and regular outline to verbal charm or grace. 
 And if his disposition, in addition to being of an 
 intellectual cast and delighting in the working out of 
 combinations and the adaptation of means to ends, 
 the coordination of parts and the comprehension of 
 wholes, is also endowed with moral intuition to di- 
 vine the human import of his subjects; then will he 
 incline to value design superlatively, not only for 
 its own sake, but as the scaffolding of a rational 
 illusion, whose sensuous elaboration he will confide 
 to the sympathetic instrumentality of style. In 
 other words, since in the balance of literature de- 
 sign is the legislative and style the executive agency, 
 it results that the presiding authority of a sane and 
 well-found literature will be intuitive and intellec- 
 tual; it will blend insight and reason. Such a liter- 
 ature will not be uncompromisingly intellectual by 
 any means, for it will be tempered by inspiration; 
 but it will be orderly, intelligible, and significant, 
 permeated through all its pores with the illusion of
 
 328 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 truth or reality — a solid, substantial, self-sufficient 
 creation of the imagination, cosmic and substantive 
 amid the chaotic rioting of sense. Such is the char- 
 acter of that noblest monument of human genius, 
 the tragedy of Sophocles — and the secret of its 
 permanency — as it is the character in relative de- 
 gree of every literature to which the designation 
 classic is properly applied. And such is the ratio- 
 nale of the classic preference for the plastic and the 
 architectonic. 
 
 In contrast with this massive unitary effect, in 
 which subject counts for so much, the effects of 
 style, as I have already indicated, are severally in- 
 complete and partial, comparable technically with 
 the dressing of stone or the chiselling of statuary. 
 As is admitted in the figures of speech affected by 
 their devotees, their affiliations are less architectural 
 than artistic in the limited English sense which has 
 always been disposed to confine art to painting — 
 colourful, for the most part, and rhythmic; decora- 
 tive or at all events, accentual. They impart warmth 
 and tone and splendour to the work of the stylist; 
 they prick out strongly the high lights; they bear 
 witness to the writer's eye for appearances; they 
 magnetize the reader's attention and flatter his 
 senses like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope or the 
 pulses of a melody — but they have no sequence, no 
 coherence; they are without a reason save as they 
 belong in a composition. In themselves they are an 
 index, not of mind, but of mood. What they meas- 
 ure are the author's sensibilities and susceptibilities. 
 Free of logic and volition they have only to follow 
 his temperament — the instinctive response of his
 
 Structure and Style 329 
 
 nature to sensuous and emotional stimulation. In 
 piquant or poignant phrase they recall the prickle 
 of sensation, the tingle of feeling without responsi- 
 bility for the merits of either: 
 
 " Old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 And battles long ago." 
 
 That is the very immediacy of impression; the sig- 
 nificance of it consists in no general idea but is con- 
 crete and inherent in the sentiment, as it were an 
 intrinsic and specific property of the thing itself, a 
 component part of the perception. Hence its charm 
 is intimate and inexplicable, like that of an admired 
 face which can not be recollected satisfactorily but 
 must be sought to again and again. That is style; 
 and there is no great passage of poetry which does 
 not owe its magnificent isolation, like this, to style 
 and style alone. But its character is evident; it is 
 the pathos of the passage, a pathos owning no obli- 
 gation to the reason or the will, which stirs the 
 reader; and all the while there is a little rustle, as 
 it were, among the memories of sense and their 
 residues, as though he had but just turned away 
 from some landscape or other spectacle of nature 
 which was still troubling his consciousness. It is 
 an aesthetic effect — haunting, nostalgic, and itself 
 unhappy. 
 
 Is it necessary to multiply examples? Whereas 
 the writer of insight and intelligence inclines to 
 make a convincing and comprehensive whole of his 
 subject because he understands it and sees his way 
 through it, while the logical and formal intellect 
 busies itself with the coordination and consolidation
 
 330 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 of the parts into a consistent and coherent body 
 or organization; the writer of sensibility, on the 
 contrary, excited by the sensual effluences of nature 
 and dizzied by the shifting panorama, the flickering 
 cinema of experience unrolling before the eyes like 
 " a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on 
 the stream " — such a temperament is bound to 
 turn from the severe abstractions of the creative 
 imagination to the cultivation of style because it is 
 possible by fastidious refinements of phrase to pro- 
 duce a kind of linguistic iridescence corresponding 
 to the shimmering surface-play of impressions which 
 makes the main interest and gratification of his 
 conscious life. 
 
 And this, I suppose, is the explanation of the 
 modern and romantic cult of style; for romanti- 
 cism is, first and foremost, a literature of the senses 
 and the emotions, of the blood and the nerves, im- 
 patient of the control of the inward monitor — 
 le maitre interieur, in Fenelon's phrase — and eager 
 to discredit its authority. About such a literature, 
 with its pretention to banish the tedium vitce forever, 
 there circulates a draught of exhilaration and expan- 
 siveness which recommends it to the young, the 
 ardent, and the intemperate in every generation. 
 Beside the intent and purposeful discipline of classi- 
 cism it poses as indulgently broad and tolerant. In 
 competition with the graces of the stylist who 
 charms by the richness and profusion of his effects 
 without much anxiety for their consistence, the pre- 
 cision of the classicist with his conscientious ad- 
 herence to principle is at the disadvantage of ap- 
 pearing meagre, even sterile at times, just as the
 
 Structure and Style 331 
 
 formality of a Greek temple may seem austere and 
 parsimonious in contrast with the extravagance of 
 a Gothic cathedral. Between the judicious frugal- 
 ity incident to form and the lavishness and caprice 
 of nature there exists an evident incompatibility. 
 Life is so abundant, so prodigal and licentious that 
 the attempt to reduce it to lean and comely pro- 
 portions is impossible without a vast amount of 
 excision, simplification, and correction. For the 
 sake of order and measure the classicist must sur- 
 render something; and he prefers to surrender 
 what is of least moment to idea — the discrete, 
 the adventitious, the exceptional — whatever re- 
 fuses to focus and converge and articulate — in 
 short, multiplicity and divarication. 
 
 Of this sort of literary economy Greek tragedy 
 remains the aptest illustration. In conception and 
 structure it corresponds as nearly as literature may 
 to the type of the Greek temple. Its purport is 
 unmistakable. Its design is so simple as to be clear 
 at a glance; even the chorus fails to disconcert it. 
 It contains only the emotion proper to the subject. 
 And as a result it leaves the strongest impression of 
 any drama ever produced. The effect is perfectly 
 definite and final. When a play is ended, the matter 
 is settled. The memory is filled with a single image, 
 the consciousness with a single theme, the mind with 
 a single decision. 
 
 But such a result is at odds with anything like 
 comprehensiveness of subject-matter or treatment 
 — it is intent, compact, instant; while breadth, 
 whether of content or handling, runs to amorphous- 
 ness and distention. Take a novel of Thackeray's
 
 33 2 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 or Dickens' — The Newcomes, for example, which 
 undertakes to represent London society in the mid- 
 dle of the last century, that is, a modern and volu- 
 minous subject; and the clear, firm contours which 
 characterize Sophocles' drama are impossible. The 
 outline of such a novel must be elastic, supple, fluid 
 — as winding and sinuous as an indented coast; it 
 must be capable of indefinite expansion like a 
 pouch or pocket. Consider the length of time cov- 
 ered by such an action, the multitude of characters 
 entangled with it, the wealth of incident included. 
 And then remember that a Greek tragedy dealt with 
 only five or six persons, that it accounted for only 
 a single moment of their lives, that it had to do with 
 only one sequence of episodes. How much easier 
 to knead a few ingredients like these into a shapely 
 loaf than to fashion a cake out of Thackeray's 
 material! Or more accurately, how much more 
 difficult to reduce a teeming and plethoric subject to 
 these narrow and punctual dimensions! Indeed, it 
 is hardly correct to speak of such a novel as having 
 a form at all; it has only a kind of rhythm, a pul- 
 sation from one incident to the next. And while 
 the later novel has been influenced by science and 
 the drama to a straiter and more methodic struc- 
 ture, it has diminished its content pari passu, and 
 without ceasing to be romantic has become only 
 more realistic in its strict preoccupation with " na- 
 ture " and its idiomatic detail. 
 
 Clearly, then, Greek tragedy does not practise 
 this admirable thrift without what is, from the 
 modern point of view, something of a sacrifice. It 
 slights a great many aspects of fact which popular
 
 Structure and Style 333 
 
 taste has come to hold in a kind of superstitious 
 awe as guarantees of reality. In particular, it fails 
 to make very much of the characteristic provoca- 
 tiveness of actuality. Many of those feelings of 
 unresolved and motiveless perplexity, amazement, 
 and consternation which we require of tragedy be- 
 cause they seem to us the essence of experience 
 are wanting to the Greek. We must suppose that 
 life as such went on for Sophocles very much as it 
 does for us — in the same clutter and at the same 
 loose ends. We may picture the crowd jostling 
 him on the street, the grimy beggar or the greasy 
 demagogue thrusting an equally unlovely face of 
 solicitation into his, with here and there a still figure 
 of philosophy musing disinterested and unregarded 
 amid the hubbub of " practical " interests; we can 
 imagine the clash of opinion, the cross-purposes, 
 passions, and suspicions of party politics which 
 made up the public life of " democratic " Athens 
 — we may think of the more tousled aspects 
 of life as present to him as to us. But to 
 this daily distraction his drama has remained 
 impervious. To be sure, a good deal of the im- 
 pertinence of common reality has worked its way 
 into Euripides, but greatly to the detriment of his 
 significance and integrity. The issue can not be 
 dodged. In order to dispose experience structurally 
 at all, in conformity with the constitution of dis- 
 course, it is necessary to reject altogether a great 
 part of the detail to which actuality is indebted 
 for its piquancy, and to admit only such particulars 
 as are capable of taking place in the permanent 
 organization of consciousness. What is unstable,
 
 334 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 indefinite, fugitive must be passed over or set aside 
 as incapable of definition or fixation. All those dim, 
 uncertain exaltations and depressions, those name- 
 less apprehensions and premonitions, those inde- 
 terminate stirrings and impulses which strain our 
 attention and warp our judgment — all these fumes 
 and vapours of the brain, many of them somatic, 
 the classicist is satisfied to ignore; they are neither 
 constitutive nor expressive. In brief, his literature 
 is something more than a succession of twitches and 
 flashes. Xor is it a mere derivative, drawing its 
 interest and justification from some other source 
 and having a purely analogical value in terms of 
 such another variable. On the contrary, it is an 
 ideal, self-sustaining and self-sufficing fabric built 
 up gradually and regularly in the imagination from 
 materials strained and sifted out of experience for 
 that purpose. 
 
 Conversely, the writer who looks upon literature 
 as a function of life, immediately responsible to ex- 
 istence and the impressions peculiar thereto, as it 
 were a kind of sensorium for the collection and regis- 
 tration of vital stimuli — such an author will set his 
 ambition in the conviction which he may succeed 
 in producing of the characteristic waywardness and 
 " wonder " of nature. In this view the idiosyncra- 
 tic, as possessed of superior actuality, tends to be- 
 come the exclusive subject of representation. Indi- 
 vidualization, not typification, is the desideratum. 
 The strange, the irregular, the unusual engross a 
 correspondingly larger share of attention. The ex- 
 ception rather than the principle comes to be the 
 rule. Form as a rationale — as aught but a me-
 
 Structure and Style 335 
 
 chanical nexus like a string around a parcel, is con- 
 sidered an impertinence. Metre, rhythm, not to 
 say the genre as such, are disqualified one after the 
 other. The laws of association are abrogated; rev- 
 erie usurps the place of rational intuition or vision. 
 And with the dissolution of the idea, style en- 
 croaches farther and farther upon the logical prov- 
 ince of composition — until finally, defeated in its 
 attempt to reproduce all the exquisite thrills of sen- 
 tiency, it abandons the struggle altogther, and 
 ceasing to be expressive at all, becomes avow- 
 edly symbolic and suggestive. 
 
 Of late the disorganization has proceeded to such 
 an extent as to have crowded pretty nearly the 
 last vestiges of mind from English poetry — which 
 has ceased to be humane or moral — and has left 
 next to nothing for criticism to take hold of. But 
 to those of us for whose youth Tennyson was the 
 poet of romantic sentiment, he will still seem the 
 natural illustration of the tendency. In him, at 
 least, the process, while sufficiently advanced to be 
 conspicuous, is not too far gone to be intelligible — 
 at worst there is always a modicum of sense remain- 
 ing; and from him I will illustrate it: — 
 
 " Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge, 
 Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, 
 Beneath them; and descending they were ware 
 That all the decks were dense with stately forms, 
 Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream — by these 
 Three Queens with crowns of gold; and from them rose 
 A cry that shivered to the tingling stars, 
 And, as it were one voice, an agony
 
 336 Romance and Tragedy 
 
 Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills 
 
 All night in a waste land, where no one comes, 
 
 Or hath come, since the making of the world." 
 
 Now, the point to which I would call attention, is 
 that these last three verses — 
 
 " a wind that shrills 
 All night in a waste land, where no one comes, 
 Or hath come, since the making of the world " — 
 
 these three lines, I say, have no rational connection 
 or reasonable association with the theme. They do 
 not constitute a part of the significant illusion, the 
 illusion of a higher reality, as such; on the con- 
 trary, they create a kind of mirage — an extremely 
 vivid one but one below the horizon of the subject 
 nevertheless. They catch just a kind of sudden 
 sentiment that the sound of mourning might pos- 
 sibly have provoked in the spirit of some musing 
 on-looker, hardly in that of an intent participant. 
 In this sense they are thoroughly romantic: they 
 pick out, like a ray of sunlight, 
 
 " Kindling the cones of hills, and journeying on," 
 
 a single eccentric detail to which the eye of the 
 inattentive traveler is immediately diverted. As a 
 whole, the effect of the passage is not that of vision 
 proper but of the romantic substitute, reverie, 
 where the mind pursues no necessary sequence of 
 ideas but is seduced from one image to another by a 
 number of more or less adventitious and arbitrary 
 cues. It is this vagrancy of fancy which we find so
 
 Structure and Style 337 
 
 pleasant in falling asleep: the sounds of the outer 
 world reach us remotely and vacantly — we hear 
 the distant clatter of hoofs along the road, the drip- 
 ping of water from the eaves, the barking of a dog 
 in the night, the untimely crowing of a cock; but 
 we connect no definite ideas with these impressions; 
 our consciousness floats indolently along, with an 
 hypnotic sense of levitation, on some easy current of 
 suggestion which they happen to have set flowing, 
 without the labour or responsibility of thought or 
 the necessity of arriving at any particular conclu- 
 sion. In such adumbrations of a vague and phan- 
 tasmal reality, which demands little in the way of 
 concentration as it offers little in the way of con- 
 tent, lies the secret of romantic literature. 
 
 " Like God, whose servants they are [Our Ladies of 
 Sorrow] they utter their pleasure, not by sounds that 
 perish or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, 
 by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries 
 painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the 
 tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled 
 the steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the 
 signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors 
 of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the 
 symbols; mine are the words." 
 
 This is the romantic mirage, as distinguished from 
 the significant illusion of classicism. Under the 
 stimulation of a style which has cultivated sug- 
 gestion to the neglect of expression, reminiscence is 
 aroused, the consciousness is suddenly injected with 
 a flood of sensuous memories and presentments — 
 the imagination moves; but inasmuch as the mind
 
 33& Romance and Tragedy 
 
 has no clear conception before it, the imagination 
 moves aimlessly and without creative activity or 
 effect. It is inspiration of a sort — the sort which 
 Nietzsche has designated as Dionysian on account of 
 the prominence of these very characters and has 
 assimilated to the irresponsible enthusiasm of in- 
 ebriety. To its influence is largely due the witchery 
 of modern poetry; it is responsible for what Mat- 
 thew Arnold calls " the magical way of handling 
 nature," — 
 
 " Or magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn " ; 
 
 and it seems to be the animating spirit of what he 
 understands distinctively as " style." As such it is 
 the achievement of English literature and the crown 
 and triumph of the romantic revival. I pass over 
 its later-day decadence, its final divorce from 
 reason and conscience, and its subsequent inanity 
 and fatuousness — such matters belong to the de- 
 generation of romance. But in measure and at 
 best, it must be rated as an enrichment of literature 
 in general and of poetry in particular — not a clear 
 gain, perhaps, but an acquisition without which we 
 should be the poorer; for within limits a literature, 
 like a race, should be credited with the variety as 
 well as with the perfection of its types. 
 
 But I have said as much as my subject warrants. 
 If I have not already succeeded, I can never hope 
 to succeed, in showing that classicism consists in 
 a just balance or equilibrium of the faculties under 
 the presidency of the divinatory reason or intuition
 
 Structure and Style 339 
 
 and that whatever tends to disturb or disrupt this 
 balance is romantic. Hence the classicist sets great 
 store by form and structure; they are the repre- 
 sentatives and trustees of order and proportion in 
 literature. He has a decided intellectual bent, as 
 witness his devotion to clear ideas and his care for 
 the consolidation of part with part in the organiza- 
 tion of his materials; but the severity of his logical 
 character is tempered by vision or insight, which 
 inspires him with a sympathetic sense for the human 
 significance of his subjects. As a result of this dis- 
 position, he inclines to a marked subdual or lower- 
 ing of the parts of the composition or to such a 
 treatment of them as shall indicate that they are 
 merely members of an association from whose soli- 
 darity they draw their own importance; and he 
 leans to a similar handling of style as an instrument 
 of thought, for the attainment of an ulterior 
 rational end. In like manner he" is conditioned to 
 the simplification and contraction of actuality, 
 whenever fact becomes embarrassing either by 
 reason of its proliferation or obscurity. The classic 
 tendency is towards clarification and concentration. 
 And finally, in this instinct for transparency and 
 definition, and in the consequent avoidance of what- 
 ever is vague and diffuse, the classic pretends to 
 convey no more than lies within the ability of the 
 author to understand or the power of language to 
 represent; it is expressive, not suggestive. Its aim 
 is to create a significant illusion of reality. 
 
 Romanticism, on the other hand, manifests itself 
 in literature by an emphasis on style above structure, 
 because the romanticist himself delights in novelty
 
 34Q Romance and Tragedy 
 
 and variety of detail even more than pertinence 
 and consistency, and it is possible by one sort of 
 phrasal ingenuity or another — the " exquisite epi- 
 thet," the " purple patch " — to mimic the changing 
 moods of nature more or less successfully. The ro- 
 mantic temperament is sensuous and emotional; it 
 is disposed, if anything, to magnify its impressions 
 severally in the interest of " wonder " and so to ex- 
 aggerate the apprehension of diversity incidental to 
 its subject-matter. And as it is prompt to respond 
 to the stimuli of experience, so it is eager to open 
 as wide a range of representation as possible. As 
 a result, romantic literature, in comparison with 
 classic, is characterized by expansiveness and diffu- 
 sion; it appears in content more abundant and 
 variegated. At the same time, it loses, as though in 
 compensation, much of the classic certainty and 
 penetration; it is less significant and intelligible. In 
 addition, its sentimental instability is constantly 
 urging it to the pursuit of the uncertain, even the 
 dubious, until in its curiosity and impulsiveness it 
 finds itself attempting to express the inexpressible. 
 Hence its abuse of suggestion. Its ambition is the 
 manifestation of " life " and the emotions proper 
 to it; its characteristic feat, the creation of a phan- 
 tom or mirage of actuality. 
 
 All modern literature is preoccupied with fact; 
 it is either scientific or romantic. The most alarm- 
 ing symptom of romanticism at present is its want 
 of mind. No one can read our current belles lettres 
 after those of the preceding century without being 
 struck by their intellectual flaccidity. In subtlety 
 and acuteness of thought, in comprehension of hu-
 
 Structure and Style 341 
 
 man nature and tradition, even in sheer common- 
 sense and plain level-headedness, to say nothing of 
 maturity of character, the writers of this age ap- 
 pear like children beside those of the eighteenth 
 century. They seem to have no moral grasp — as 
 Goethe said of Friedrich Schlegel, no inner Halt. 
 With a plausible appearance of liberality in its 
 programme — with its passionate appeal to the 
 instinct of individual freedom and its spirited pleas 
 for breadth and tolerance, romanticism has always 
 been cursed by its impatience of discipline and re- 
 straint and its indulgence of dissipation and irre- 
 sponsibility. To that sense of enlargement without 
 which life is a drab and dusty chronicle there are 
 but two conceivable means — dissipation and dis- 
 cipline. That the former is the more " natural " 
 and spontaneous may be granted. It is the way of 
 youth, which giving free rein to its impulses and 
 feeding on self-deception, revels in its license to do 
 as it likes. But the other is the way of understand- 
 ing, which leads its followers through carefulness 
 and control to self-possession and the power to do 
 as they will. Between these two states, that of 
 effortless abandonment to caprice and that of pur- 
 poseful exertion — an interval which measures the 
 difference between the green Goethe and the ripe, 
 the Goethe of Werther and of Iphigenie — lies a 
 limbo for him before whose eyes has dissolved the 
 mirage of youth — a period of nostalgia and skep- 
 ticism ere he finds himself capable of the higher 
 and significant illusion of character through a 
 settled and confirmed habit of the will — 
 
 rjdos 81a edos
 
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